There is a revealing honesty in what a man reaches for when he has no time to compose his face. For twenty years at White Heron Hall, Senior Steward Osen Tal had cultivated the aura of an omniscient administrator. A calm, soft-spoken official who knew every secret budget, every punishment weakness, and every hidden shelf inside the mountain. Even in his study three hours earlier, while dropping the transfer warrant into the coals, he had spoken as though he held the entire history of the Counterpoise Sect and the Hollow Summit weighed and balanced in his palm.
Yet the instant Archivist Vel hurled the two twenty-pound leather-bound catalogues out over the deep pit of the Ravine of Unfinished Forms, Osen’s composed superiority shattered fully. He didn’t look at Vel’s buttoned shirt front where the bone knife had just flashed. He didn’t ask why the old clerk had sliced the inner gutter threads before throwing the books. Reacting purely on office reflex—the deep, conditioned terror of an official watching the physical evidence of his career vanish beyond his control—Osen shoved past his lead halberdier’s left elbow and lunged straight to the frost-glazed outer lip of the switchback.
“Catch the bindings!” Osen shouted down into the swirling mist, his left hand clamping onto the taut hemp climbing rope anchored to the iron piton at the tunnel mouth. Meanwhile, he leaned more than half of his torso out over the hundred-foot drop. His right arm snatched wildly at the empty air two feet…
