Below the dry cistern, the maintenance stair plunged back into the cliff through a series of steep switchbacks cut along an old fault seam.
Water seeped through the limestone overhead, making the square-cut treads slick with black lime mud. Lilt had to walk with her broad tail-rudder lifted and her leading fin-tips tucked high against her ribs, her claws clicking warily on every turn. Twice Chaska had to pause at a corner landing and tilt the jointed spars of her gliding frame flat so they would clear a projecting boss of stone.
Osha’s pace slowed after the third switchback.
Her square archive case was built of oak boards bound in boiled leather, meant to be carried fifty paces from a vault cart to a reading lectern by two novices. It held copies of the first three memory stones from the plateau—Theru’s burrowing Finder in the collapsed trenches, her death on the refugee bridge, and the first tunnel bond—along with Osha’s brass callipers and her father Amren’s small cloth-bound notebook. The sharp corner of the case struck her knee at every second step, and her hands, soft from archive chalk and ink, were red where the stiff leather handle cut into her fingers.
