From the swaying oak planks of the staging scaffold twelve feet above the floorboards, Len Vey looked down upon the two figures standing six paces apart before the iron faceplate of the Orchard Ward Claimant Cabinet.
The air in the underground cellar was charged with an unnatural, static heaviness that raised the fine hairs along his neck. Then it made the copper ferrules of his sounding pole hum with a faint, metal drone. Wisps of intense violet vapor were curling from the cabinet angled slats now, coiling through the green intersecting shafts of Melli’s battery lanterns like oily ribbons of smoke.
“On my mark!” Len called down, his right arm extended straight, his fingers splayed in the universal courier pacing signal. “Three quarter-turns counter-clockwise! Maintain equal torque on both spindles! If one key leads the other by more than five degrees, the internal gear catch jams!”
Down in the green glare, Elsi Marr and Corin Petch gripped their respective crossbars.
Elsi had planted her hobnailed boots wide on the damp flat stone slabs, her thick shoulders hunched like an ox setting into a mountain furrow. Her woolen smock was plastered to her back with cold sweat. But her wrists—hardened by four decades of driving spades through clay and levering oak logs into kiln beds—were locked into rigid iron clamps around the bronze crossbar of the Delegate Seal.
