By mid-afternoon, the entire party had reached the broad, dry terrace above the drained central basin, where the stone roof opened to the sky and the wind smelled of wet pine instead of old iron.
While Kiv and two of the soldiers got a small resin fire going under a rock overhang to boil linen strips for the wounded, Osha spread a clean square of oilcloth across a flat boulder near the edge of the camp. From Ashaun’s canvas ration sack she emptied out every piece of metal and mineral they had carried up from the floor of the bell chamber: three jagged chunks of the black iron clapper, the two split, chalky halves of the seed organ, the snapped steel blade and wire-wrapped hilt of Ashaun’s bell dagger, and the one thumb-sized grey chip of the destroyed Falling Bells archive stone that Pip had tucked into its fold the day before.
Osha knelt beside the boulder and unpacked the two testing instruments that had survived the journey in her padded leather case: a slender two-pronged copper tuning fork used in temple vaults to detect resonant stone, and a shallow brass dish filled with clear water and suspended iron filings.
