Climbing out of the shrine hollow over the back of the eastern rubble wall so they wouldn’t disturb the two-ton timber barricade blocking the lower gate, Seyun and Ilyra walked the leftover half-mile up the limestone spur with three paces of freezing fog between their shoulders. Neither spoke on the ascent. The rain was turning rapidly to sleet again, coating the stunted juniper bushes in a rattling glaze of ice.
At the crest of the spur. There, the ridge narrowed between two sheer drops into the river gorge, stood the blackened stone skeleton of the Monastery of the Last Question. Two hundred years of mountain gales and winter frost had toppled its central bell-tower and stripped every glazed tile from its cloister roofs. Only the heavy load-bearing ribs of soot-stained limestone remained standing against the night sky. It looked like the charred hull of a barge stranded on a reef.
True to the terms of their truce, they divided the ruin at the inner courtyard arch. Ilyra claimed the drier eastern threshold beneath the surviving stone vault of the outer gallery. A position that commanded a clear sightline down the narrow raised stone road while also allowing her to watch the doorway of the central quiet focus hall twenty paces away.
Without asking for Seyun’s help, she sat down with her back braced against a grooved gallery pillar. She pulled a roll of clean linen bandage from her saddle-pouch with her right hand, and used her teeth and her sound fingers to bind the clotting knife gash across her left shoulder muscle before laying the seven-foot marsh-iron spear across her knees.
Seyun walked into the roofless shell of the central quiet focus hall. Huge blocks of dressed granite from the collapsed upper high window row lay tumbled across the floor in jagged heaps, half-buried under drifts of dead pine needles and wet soot. He moved slowly among the rubble with his bundle under his arm, on the surface searching for a dry corner out of the northern wind where he could unroll his torn reed mat.
In truth, his eyes were measuring the floor slabs against the twelve-part land-mapper’s drawing he had learned by heart from the dead grave robber’s satchel.
Near the back of the hall. There, the abbey’s contemplation dais had once stood, two massive circular lotus-stone bases of carved gray granite had tilted toward each other during the ancient fire. It formed a low, tent-like shelter four feet high that blocked the sightline from the eastern gallery door.
Ducking beneath the overhang of the tilted stone bases and setting his bundle down, Seyun noticed a physical detail that no mason or chimney pipe-tender could overlook. Outside in the open nave of the hall, the freezing rain stood in two-inch puddles over the glazed mortar. Here between the two lotus-stone bases, though water was running steadily down the sloped stone faces above him, the cracked flat stone slab floor was almost fully dry.
Instead of pooling in the low basin between the stones, every trickle of rainwater vanished silently into a hairline seam where the western lotus-stone base had shifted half an inch off its foundation bed.
Before ducking beneath the two tilted granite lotus-stone bases at the back of the quiet focus hall, Seyun took ten slow paces around the outer edge of the roofless nave to verify how the upper ruin had died. At Ash Reed, when new students asked about the ruined Monastery of the Last Question on the eastern horizon, the elders said only that an old order of contemplative monks had let their butter-lamps catch the roof timbers during a winter gale two hundred years ago.
Touching the inner face of the northern window arch with his scarred knuckles, Seyun saw right away that the butter-lamp story was a polite fable. A timber roof burned by accident from the inside. Then, the rising heat blackened the upper courses of stone while leaving the lower base-blocks relatively clean. The walls fell inward as the tie-beams parted.
Here, the six-foot granite piers of the quiet focus hall had been snapped off at waist height from the outside in, their fractures showing the clear fan-shaped flaking off of high-realm Bronze and Jade impacts delivered at the same time from three sides of the compass. The walls had been battered down. Then, someone had piled pitch-wood over the rubble and burned the fallen beams for three days to calcine the carved stone carvings on the inside pillars into unreadable white lime.
Yet whoever had razed the upper abbey with such careful thoroughness had left the two massive ten-ton granite lotus-stone bases where they toppled over the rear dais. Assuming that twenty tons of solid stone crashing onto the quiet focus flags had crushed whatever lay beneath.
In fact, the two circular stone bases had wedged against each other like the two halves of a mason’s relieving arch, taking the entire weight of the falling high window row on their curved backs and preserving the three-foot flat stone slab span underneath them without a crack.
Seyun knelt on the cold stone and pressed his right ear flat against the seam. The exact test stance he had used for three months in the dark brick passages beneath Joren’s fire room at Ash Reed. He closed his eyes and separated the sounds of the winter storm above into distinct layers: the high hiss of sleet on the broken walls, the whistle of wind through the empty window arches, and, twenty feet below his ear in the solid limestone of the spur, the slow, musical plink of water dripping into a standing stone water tank.
More telling than the water was what touched his cheek along the hairline crack. A faint, steady current of air was rising out of the seam. Fully dry, twenty degrees warmer than the sleet outside, and carrying the clear metal tang of old copper, dry bone-dust, and unburned stone.
A collapsed cellar filled with rubble didn’t breathe warm, dry air against a storm draft. Only an intact vaulted chamber cut deep into the bedrock could hold its own air pressure across two hundred winters.
Kneeling inside that narrow stone tent out of the wind, with the dry, copper-scented air current rising steadily against his cheek from the hairline floor seam, Seyun listened once more toward the outer gallery twenty paces away. He heard the faint rustle of oiled wool as Ilyra shifted her healthy right shoulder against the gallery pillar. He was followed by the soft, metal clink of her spear collar settling across her knee-plates. She was awake and watching the raised stone road, entirely unaware that the abbey she was guarding had a second throat beneath its stones.
To test how much force the cracked bridging flat stone slab needed before moving, Seyun slid the flat square-hammered shaft of his longest copper needle into the hairline mortar joint at its western end. Six inches down, the needle tip met no solid bedrock at all. Only the smooth, beveled lip of an ancient bronze balance weight catch that had already been sprung once within the last month. That left a film of fresh animal fat grease along the stone socket.
Glancing once through the gap between the tumbled high window row blocks toward the eastern gallery, Seyun saw only the pale tip of Ilyra’s marsh-iron spear resting motionless across her knees behind the screen wall. Her breathing had slowed into the deep, regular rhythm of a Late Flame fighter resting a torn muscle.
Working without a sound, Seyun wedged the iron-shod heel of his boot under the cantilevered lip of the smaller cracked flat stone slab bridging the lotus-stone bases, braced his palms against the granite lotus petals above his shoulders. Then he eased the slab three inches sideways along its wet clay bed until a dark, narrow square of open space yawned beneath his knees.
Whoever had drawn the twelve-part land-mapper’s map in the dead grave robber’s satchel had already found this exact lotus-stone base seam, oiled the balance weight catch so the slab would slide without screeching, and gone down into the dark below. Bracing his heels silently on the dry rock, Seyun levered the greased bridging slab three inches aside and prepared to follow them.
Before sliding his legs into the narrow black opening beneath the lotus-stone bases, Seyun paused to memorize the exact arrangement of the rubble around the quiet focus dais so he could reset every pebble if he had to climb back up in a hurry. Along the southern edge of the bridging flat stone slab, three grey lichen-covered chips of granite had been displaced. Just then, the earlier visitor pried the stone. Seyun lined those three chips along the stone base rim where his fingertips could find them blindly from underneath.
He also unbuckled the dead grave robber’s calfskin satchel from his waist. Then he tied its leather strap tight across his chest under his left arm, ensuring the bag couldn’t swing out and strike the stone riser while he dropped. His oilskin ledger bundle went into the front fold of his wool tunic directly over his ribs. His three four-inch copper needles remained accessible at his right hip.
Listening one last time to the sleet hissing over the ruined cloister and the slow, regular breathing of the injured White Heron spearwoman in the outer gallery, Seyun lowered his boots onto the first dry bedrock tread. Then he drew the bridging slab back until only a thumb-width crack of night air remained overhead.