For two full counts of the ward’s breathing cycle, nobody in the lower chamber spoke. The voice that had come down the inside of the black bronze pillar didn’t boom with the artificial majesty that sect elders practiced for festival assemblies, nor did it carry the eerie, hollow echo of a spirit trapped in a fire vessel. It was simply the dry, weathered voice of an older woman whose throat had breathed cold mountain air in a stone room for twenty winters, carried downward by the sound seam of the hollow metal shaft.
Seyun looked up at the dark bronze skin of the column where it pierced the ceiling stonework. He didn’t need Osen Tal to introduce the speaker. In Master Uren’s final letter beneath the Monastery of the Last Question, the dying teacher had written of the Crown challenger who had broken the Counterpoise Sect’s living vows one by one and refused to kill him on the night the abbey burned. And in the Archive of Quiet Names beneath White Heron Hall, Archivist Vel had pulled a twenty-year-old supply order slip signed by Osen Tal for dark restraint needles forged to hold Nara Soth inside the Hollow Summit.
She was awake, she had been listening through the bronze floor to every word spoken beside Halin’s bed. She had felt the exact fractional beat when Socket One went quiet.
