A single animal fat dip guttered in a clay pot saucer on the workbench of the second-floor room above the leather-currier’s shop in Tanner’s Lane. Down below the floorboards, the vats of oak-bark liquor gave off a sour, astringent tang that seeped through the pine knots and mingled with the river damp of the North Ward. Daro Kesh sat cross-legged on a folded horse-blanket in the center of the room, his coarse hemp coat laid aside and his scarred shoulders bare to the draft.
Directly across his knees rested the twenty-two-pound grey limestone tablet of the Counterpoise Sect.
He had washed the dust of the Old Wrestling Lodge from its bevels with a rag dipped in cold well-water. He set his iron-mounted sword parallel to the floor beside his right hip. For the first hour after nightfall, he had simply read the chiseled text by the yellow animal fat light, tracing the clean, square characters of Master Uren’s first half—the foundational shape of the Returning Step that Seyun had used in the pit—and then moving his calloused thumb down across the jagged natural fracture line into the denser, deeper-cut diagrams of the lower half.
Now, for the third in a row hour since the watch-bell had rung nine at the north gate, Daro was trying to make the lower diagrams answer his breath.
