By noon of the fifth day at Sluice-Gate—the fourth dawn of the seven-dawn countdown—the last grey river-slate was pegged into place along the northern ridge-beam of Marta’s cottage, and Seyun, Tomas, and young Lorn had moved their ladder across the narrow yard to mend the cracked flashing around the stone chimney-stack of the limewashed burial house.
Seyun knelt beside the chimney-stack with his trowel. Then, working a smooth fillet of hair-mortar into the joint between the warm chimney pipe-stones and the roof-slates, the fourth dawn’s echo pulsed steadily behind his breastbone like a banked forge shop forge.
Four days of living inside the approaching deep ring of Ilyra’s Early Bronze crossing had stripped away his last misconception about how the Account Book’s body link actually worked.
He had first bound her name into Place I in the rain outside Oran. Then, he had half-expected the seven-dawn echo to press a copy of her White Heron spear-manual into his spirit veins. Forcing a clerk who fought with his bare palms and a wooden buckler to move like an inner-hall lancer.
Now, as he smoothed the wet lime around the chimney-base. Meanwhile, the fourth-dawn heat turned in a slow, nonstop figure-eight through his solar nerve web and ribs, he understood the truth.
