The bronze tone didn’t begin as sound. It began as a dry tremor in the soles of Kezra’s boots. It rose through the limestone flat stone slabs of the upkeep lane and shook against the iron nails in her heels before it ever reached the morning air.
It was the voice of three anchors speaking through bedrock. Eighteen miles north, at the wind-scoured bench of Empty Choir, two matched bedrock cuts answered the pulse across sixty thousand paces of folded granite. Here at the southwestern corner of Stonewake Citadel. There, the service wall met the native cliff, the third anchor hummed inside the socket she had chiselled with her mallet.
A faint green soft glow bordered the thick parchment page beneath her palm.
The first beat struck.
It was a slow, ringing stroke, deep as a bell struck under forty deep-water lengths of lake water. The stone beneath the castle courtyard took up the shaking. It carried it along four thousand and ninety-six paces of outer edge ditch, up through the cut stone foundations, and into the iron-rimmed tires of sixty baggage wagons.
Inside the castle walls, three hundred and eighteen men and women felt the world shudder beneath their boots.
