Ilyra right away saw the rigor of what Seyun was proposing. She pulled her hand back from the iron-bound siege roll to reopen the pre-siege inventory folio to Cell Fourteen, Upper Terrace. If their phonetic object-table was an accurate historical key rather than a coincidence of numbers, then decoding a routine pre-siege entry from the Monastery of the Last Question had to match the physical stones Seyun and Ilyra had both walked across on the mountain burial road.
“Read the load-bearing lines of Cell Fourteen first, Ilyra,” Seyun said. He opened his Account Book to the earliest pages he had written after leaving Ash Reed. Where he had sketched the collapsed underground cell beneath the third funerary shrine.
“Cell Fourteen, Upper Terrace, South-West Drain,” Ilyra read clearly from the faded brown ink. “Approached by seventeen dark rock steps below the Third Way-Shrine. Threshold grooved for a balance weight stone door.”
Seyun pointed to the first page of his own ledger sketch. “Seventeen dark rock steps down from the third funerary shrine on the burial road—the exact shrine where my weight-release angle freed your spear from the stone groove when we first met. Now read the furniture and object set inside Cell Fourteen.”
