The rival historian placed a second inscription beside the partial line and pointed to the same word.
“Here it appears beside extraction without a right to refuse,” she said. “If you translate the word itself as voluntary, the sentence stops telling you what happened.”
Ilyan read the passage before answering. The interpreter repeated it in the surface language, then paused over the disputed term. Eli could see her reluctance to supply a meaning that would decide the disagreement for everyone who could not read the stone.
“Service,” she said at last. “For now. The conditions around it remain disputed.”
The historian nodded. Ilyan did not.
“In the earlier line, the people choose an interval,” he said. “They name the end of it. That cannot be erased because later keepers used the same term differently.”
“I am not erasing it. I am refusing to put its conditions inside every later use.”
They had been speaking for only a few minutes, and already Eli could see two different accusations passing between them. Ilyan heard that the old builders had never asked anyone. The other historian heard that the later coercion could be softened by a story about the beginning. Neither had actually said what the other feared.
