Seyun had overturned the iron fire bowl to blind the vanguard operatives. Then, the spilling wave of forty pounds of birch charcoal had carried the blazing sheepskin scroll off the brass pan and onto the flat stone slabs three feet from the rosewood table. That fall had saved the document from being burned up all at once in the packed draft of the fire bowl. But it had buried the upper half of the unrolled parchment under four inches of live, blazing bright red coals. Meanwhile, the lower half curled upward in a brisk yellow sheet of linseed flame.
There were no iron fire-tongs by the wall. Osen Tal’s neat bronze tongs had been kicked under the collapsed bookcase. Just then, the granite top door beam dropped. There was no water pitcher in the room. Only the heavy clay teapot on the rosewood table, which had shattered when Ilyra blocked the lead operative’s trench blade across the wood.
And there was no time to use the butt of a boot or a rolled cloak to rake the parchment free without tearing the brittle, heat-crisped two-hundred-year-old sheepskin into unreadable black flakes.
Seyun dropped to both knees at the edge of the glowing coal-drift.
