Seyun unbuckled the front pocket of his satchel, drew out his oilskin-wrapped Account Book and his stub of carpenter’s charcoal. Then he crouched on the dry granite crescent with the open ledger balanced across his knee.
His twice-burned palms were stiff inside their linen bandages. That made his grip on the charcoal clumsy in the freezing air. So he braced the side of his right thumb against the paper edge the way he had done down in the tester vault.
Inside the ring of dark iron needles, Nara Soth watched him turn to a fresh page behind the list of the twelve wired townspeople.
“What are you writing now, boy?” she asked.
“The thirty-one names of the people who died in the lower beds before tonight, as soon as you give them to me,” Seyun answered without looking up from the page, “and the exact routing of the four inner dorsal needles and the thirty-two outer floor channels. And before I go back downstairs to map the rib-locks with my sister, I need to check one mismatch between Master Uren’s skeleton in the abbey ruin and Osen’s supply order records.”
He lifted his eyes from the ledger to meet hers.
