Osen Tal laid two ink-stained fingers on the upper margin of the two-hundred-year-old oiled sheepskin scroll, right over the land-mapper’s drawing of the fractured granite peak labeled VAULT ZERO — THE HOLLOW SUMMIT.
“You have read the siege roll of Cell Fourteen. You have read Vaska Ren’s twenty-year-old alloy slip,” Osen said, his voice low and urgent in the quiet study. “So let’s dispense with the fairy tales we tell the outer-court new students and speak of the mountain as it actually stands. Two hundred winters ago, the First Examiner Council didn’t raze the Abbey of the Last Question. That was because they were offended by Master Uren’s heterodox philosophy. They besieged the abbey. That was because the great northern earth-rift above the Broken Tooth pass was tearing wider every winter. No traditional array of quarry jade could hold the underground fire back.”
“Because a traditional array only pushes outward against pressure,” Seyun said. He looked down at the land-mapper’s lines on the sheepskin. There, three nested rings of rock-chimney pipes came together on a single central chamber deep inside the northern peak. “It can’t absorb and return a shifting load the way an Answering Spirit vein bond does.”
“Exactly,” Osen said. He nodded once at Seyun as if relieved to speak to someone who understood fire mechanics. “Master Uren’s third sworn rival, Nara Soth, had just crossed into the Crown realm four months before the winter solstice—the only fighter in three hundred years whose intention was wide enough to…
