In the quiet hours between midnight and the first grey light of the fifteenth day, the currier’s yard below Tanner’s Lane was silent except for the occasional stamp of a heavy cart-mule in the stable shed and the drip of dew from the tarred roof-shingles. Inside the second-floor room, Daro Kesh lit a second animal fat dip from the dying stub of the first and tilted the grey limestone tablet forty degrees against his knee so the candle-flame threw sharp shadows across the smallest block of characters below the break.
Here the chisel marks were narrower and steeper than in the main diagrams, cut by an older hand that didn’t waste stone on ornament.
To the fighter of an unbroken vessel who reads this stone, Master Uren’s stone carving began, don’t mistake the hunger of the Answering Spirit vein for a wound that you may cut into yourself with your own knife.
Daro’s thumb stopped on the rough edge of the margin.
For the past hour, an ugly, silent math had been turning slowly at the back of his mind. Every veteran fighter in the river counties knew that channels could be damaged by over-venting or internal impact. Daro had watched Seyun empty his entire Flame reserve into the falling cedar crossbeam at the Old Wrestling Lodge. Then, he had assumed the young clerk’s strange, yielding foundation had been born from some earlier accident in the Ash Reed storehouses. If the Balance return circuit needed an unsealed gap beneath the…
