After Geth Marr signed. Then he sent his riggers into the dark, a heavy, hesitant silence dropped upon the platform. An older man from the Salt Ward benches stood up, his shoulders rounded by forty winters of tending glass kilns, his wool coat patched at the elbows with coarse ticking.
It was Kester Holt, the master glassblower who had lost both his sixth and seventh milestones to a showed up double five years ago during the Year Seven purge. His hands trembled as he approached the frame stands, his fingers twitching with a fine, rhythmic tremor that made him tuck his knuckles into his apron pockets.
“Land-mapper,” Holt said, his voice raspy and cracked from decades of breathing sulfur fumes and hot borax dust. He looked down at the parchment where Article Four was written in Urel’s black ink. “My double... The thing that took my place in the master lehr... It has Thermal Sight and Steady Hand. It can look through four inches of molten pot-glass and see a single air seed no larger than a grain of sand. It can anneal an eighty-pound metal tube of sight plate without a hairline fracture.”
He pulled his right hand from his apron and held it up in the animal fat light. The fingers shook continuously, a reflex, palsied flutter that betrayed the destroyed nerve channels in his forearm.
