Fifty yards further up the basin, a fifth statue stood leaning at a dangerous tilt above a frost-heaved gulley. It was the carved likeness of a young quarry-mason holding a stone-hammer against his chest, and winter ice had got into a deep horizontal vein across his left ankle. Every time the morning sun warmed the granite enough to make the statue shift half an inch toward the road, the split ankle groaned and threatened to shear clean through, which would pitch six hundredweight of carved stone down the scree into the ravine.
“That’s Young Pell,” the Stone Shepherd sighed, rubbing its forehead with its left horn-palm. “If I grab him by the shoulders with my horns to pull him back from the edge, his foot stays behind in the gravel and he’ll spend the next three centuries rolling around on his belly like a seal. I haven’t got three hands to wedge the crack and steady his chest at the same time.”
“We have ten hands and a barrow of lime-chalk,” Ysabet said, setting down the shafts. “Show us where the balance point is.”
For the next hour nobody talked about gods or prophecies; they did masonry work in the cold wind. Chaska threw a doubled hemp rope around Young Pell’s granite shoulders and snubbed it around a firmly rooted boulder while Kiv and Ashaun jammed flat slate shims under the tilting base. Pip walked carefully up to the downhill side of the statue—not throwing a wide mental net over…
