The brass-and-iron key turned in the fourth stone’s socket with a heavy, greased click.
“Get back from the table!” Sister Osha cried out, spinning from the sundial to grab the escort’s wrist, but the tall guard caught her elbow with his padded forearm and shoved her hard against the stone plinth before she could reach the box. The second escort stepped in beside his partner, planting his heavy boots wide to block the stone bench while keeping his hands near the inner fold of his wool cloak.
Unlike the first three archive stones, which had lain inert in their velvet hollows until Pip chose to place a claw against their quartz skin, the fourth stone had been fitted in the chapter vault with a temple projection key. Deep inside the gold-veined sphere, an internal spring wound against a sliver of old resonant bell-metal struck a spark.
A column of blinding white-gold light shot straight up from the stone table into the mountain mist.
The air on the observatory plateau did not merely brighten; it thickened until drawing a breath felt like pulling warm marsh water into the lungs. Instantly the frost-cracked granite flagstones disappeared beneath the phantom image of a vast, flooded reed-fen stretching ten miles between low chalk hills under a torn autumn sky.
