The ash handles of the extraction litter bit through the grain of Len Vey’s right glove. It pressed into the calloused meat of his palm. He walked backward with his knees bent. His boots took the wet slate flags of the covered domestic walkway one pace at a time. His left arm remained bound against his ribs by Doma Reel’s tight linen chest swathe, throbbing with a dull, sickening heat that sent a sour taste into the back of his mouth. Every time his heel settled into a mortar seam, the shock traveled up his thigh bone, through his locked hip, and into his bruised shoulder socket. He didn’t slow his stride. A courier learned early on the northern roads that counting paces kept the stomach from heaving. There were forty paces between the staff quarters and the open stone railing.
To his left, beyond the round arches of the stone row of stone pillars, the central courtyard of the Star tower opened out beneath the unbending ceiling of Rookvale’s twelve-year night.
It didn’t look like the quiet sky-high academy his father had described in old letters. Twelve years of state building and emergency triage had stripped away the fancy boxwoods and gravel paths. It replaced them with a fortified heavy-duty battery. Huge copper guide-rod trunks, each as thick as a grown oak and ringed by heavy hoops of cast lead, crawled out of underground stone trenches. They climbed the outside curves of the central dome like the root systems…
