“Retain only the names, Master Vel,” Seyun said, his voice cutting cleanly through the roar of the winter creek and the whistle of the gorge wind. “And discard everything else if necessary.”
For the space of a single heartbeat, Archivist Vel stood motionless on the narrow limestone shelf with his crooked fingers resting on the half-open brass buckle. Across the five-foot gap, Osen Tal frowned slightly, suspecting a rhetorical trick. Meanwhile, the lead Court halberdier tightened his grip on his ash shaft. Inside Vel’s mind, however, Seyun’s twelve words struck with the clarifying force of a mason’s chisel splitting an unneeded casing away from the core stone.
For four decades in the dark writing hall beneath the spear court, Vel had survived by treating the camouflage and the truth as a single indivisible object. Because the names of the dead Balance students—Aven at the smoke-water gate, Master Uren with his three marks, Nara Soth passed to the Hollow Summit. Vaska Ren’s needle supply order—were sewn inside the center bindings of two massive, three-hundred-page foundry catalogues of obsolete pikes, iron spittoons, and quiet focus stools, the scroll-keeper had come to revere the heavy leather covers and the hundreds of pages of mundane hardware tallies as sacred relics in themselves. That respect had nearly crushed him on the upper cliff overhang. Now its weight was about to get his protectors killed.
