“Wait,” Ilyra said sharply as Seyun stepped through the broken gateway arch into the courtyard. Her wounded left shoulder tensed, and even though her palms were locked to the spear shaft, she shifted her right heel half an inch to keep her shin between him and the dead robber’s calfskin satchel. “Don’t touch the ash shaft while you kneel. My Late Flame is still caught in the grain. If an unshielded Coal hand closes on the wood, the back-pressure will blister your skin to the bone.”
“I have no reason to touch your spear,” Seyun answered. He walked wide around the dead grave robber, giving both the corpse’s satchel and Ilyra’s silver waist-token three clear paces of room. Then he knelt on one knee in the freezing mud on the north side of the granite stone stand.
Up close, the ringing hum inside the stele was strong enough to make his teeth ache slightly in his jaw. He looked at Ilyra’s hands from two feet away. He saw that the skin across her knuckles had turned a livid white-purple from the reciprocal lock. Meanwhile, a thin trickle of fresh blood from her shoulder cut was running down the outside of her left thumb onto the iron collar of the spearhead. She was holding her stance with admirable discipline, never letting a groan pass her teeth. But another ten minutes in this frost would stiffen her injured shoulder muscle beyond use.
Seyun reached down with both hands and scooped away the wet mat of rotted oak leaves, thorny bramble stems, and red shale clay that had washed against the base of the monument. Six inches below the current level of the courtyard flags, his fingernails struck the beveled upper edge of a sunken level tablet of dark gray river slate.
The face of the sunken tablet was caked solid with hardened yellow silt that had dried during the autumn drought and frozen into a gritty crust under the winter sleet. Scraping at it with a bare fingernail only smeared the clay deeper into the shallow chisel grooves, and using an iron tool like the dead robber’s pry-bar would risk triggering a backup spark from the oath-stone above.
Without pause, Seyun reached to his hip, unhooked his bamboo water flask. Then he pulled the wooden stopper with his teeth. Around a quarter-pint of clean spring water remained inside. The last water he had brought out of Ash Reed, meant to boil his salt-tea shaving tonight at the ruined abbey.
Ilyra looked down over her pinned hands as the clear water splashed across the frozen clay at the base of the stone. She saw the travel-worn emptiness of his belt pouch and knew instantly that a man walking the ridge on foot in winter didn’t pour out his drinking flask lightly.
“There’s rainwater in the puddles behind the porch,” she said, a note of gruff surprise entering her voice.
“The puddles are full of clay grit and blood from your thief,” Seyun replied without looking up. He poured the last drops of clean spring water directly into the recessed letter-grooves. He folded back the cuff of his own wool coat and used the coarse, wet cloth of his inner sleeve to scrub the softened silt out of the stone channels in short, careful strokes.
For three winters at Ash Reed, when Elder Hesh had set him to copying the damaged boundary stones brought in from the lower parish weirs, Seyun had learned to read worn stone carvings with the pad of his thumb. Just then, the light was too poor for eyes alone. He closed his eyes against the dripping fog. Then he ran his wet right thumb slowly across the washed slate.
Beneath his skin, the square third-dynasty strokes emerged one by one, cut four tenths of an inch deep by a patient mason’s chisel. First the water-radical of the lower river bend, then the crossed-timber sign of a weir gate, and finally the personal given name.
Seyun knelt in the freezing red clay at the north face of the stone stand. Then, he felt the familiar, steady warmth of his Coal breath drop automatically into his hands to keep his fingers nimble against the ice-cold silt. Beside his right shoulder, only ten inches away, Ilyra’s grey-and-white cloak hung heavy with rainwater and blood. He could smell the clean cedar-oil waterproofing that White Heron Hall used on its travel wool, mixed with the sharp iron scent of her shoulder wound and the faint, ozone-dry tang of her Late Flame breath flow.
He poured the last of his spring water out of the bamboo flask onto the sunken slate. Then, a few cold droplets splashed against the instep of Ilyra’s left boot. She didn’t flinch, though he heard her draw a quiet breath through her teeth as the cold reached her chilled ankles.
“My teacher’s senior scroll-keeper, Vel, still keeps a shelf of third-dynasty parish rubbings in the cellar beneath our hall,” Ilyra remarked while Seyun’s wet sleeve scrubbed the clay from the recessed characters. She spoke partly to keep her mind off the throbbing ache in her locked wrists and partly because watching an unbadged traveler clean an ancient tomb with his own drinking water unsettled her assumptions about him. “None of the inner students ever goes down to read them. Steward Osen says pre-charter water-marks have no legal force before the Aperture Court.”
“A stone water gate doesn’t need legal force to turn a flood, White Heron,” Seyun said, his eyes closed as his thumb traced the deep, square chisel-cut of the character Maro. “Every time the spring snow melts on the northern crags, half the water that misses Oran’s west wall runs through the seventh spillway channel this man cut into the shale two hundred years ago. If the mortar he laid is still keeping the city’s cellars dry, the least a living fighter can do is pronounce his name right.” Even under two hundred years of red mountain silt, the mason’s square bevels held the rainwater like tiny level troughs across the dark slate.
“Maro of the Reed-Weir, Warden of the Seventh Sluice,” Seyun read aloud. He opened his eyes and sitting back on his wet heels. He shook the empty bamboo flask once, corked it, and hooked it back at his waist. “He built the stone spillway two miles below the High Sluice fork during the seventeenth year of the old prefecture.”
He stood up, wiping the yellow clay from his knees with the back of his hand. Any ordinary mercenary or outer-sect scavenger on the mountain road, finding a White Heron prodigy pinned to a stone with an armed accomplice loose in the woods, would have named his price before giving her the release formula—her silver token, the contents of the dead robber’s satchel, or a sworn safe-conduct past the Oran ferries.
Seyun simply stepped back two paces to give her elbow room when the shaft came free. “Let the Late Flame drop out of your forearms until your wrists are no warmer than the rain,” he instructed her clearly. “Then speak the old valley release phrase on a single unforced breath out: Warden Maro of the Seventh Sluice, this traveler struck in defense of your threshold and asks leave to withdraw her iron in peace. Don’t pull until the stone answers.”
He opened his eyes, checked the third clause of the stone carving once more with his fingertip to be certain the dialect particle at the end was peace rather than tribute. Then he rose from the mud. His knees were soaked through to the skin and his bamboo flask was dry. But the small satisfaction of uncovering an honest piece of work in the weeds warmed his chest more than the salt-tea would have.
“Why did you not ask for the dead thief’s purse or a safe-conduct pass before reading the name aloud?” Ilyra asked, looking at him sideways over her cramped knuckles. “You have an empty flask and an unbadged coat. My hands are pinned to this slab.”
“Because a measurement doesn’t change its value depending on what you charge for it,” Seyun said simply. He stepped back two paces toward the wall to give her shaft room to slide clear. “And if I had asked for your pass-token while your hands were tied to a stone, I’d be no better than the men who took my sister’s herbs yesterday. Speak the phrase on an unforced breath out, and let your wrists go soft as the iron leaves the hole.”
Ilyra looked down at the washed slate tablet where the name Maro of the Reed-Weir glistened under the cold rainwater. No tutor at White Heron Hall had ever spoken to her in that flat, unrushed register—neither flattering her talent nor trying to extract a favor from her station. She drew a slow breath into her chest, let her shoulders drop an inch away from her ears. Then she prepared to speak the dead warden’s name.