Once the thirty-first name had been entered into the Account Book and the charcoal dust blown carefully from the page so it wouldn’t smudge, Seyun closed the oilskin cover. He tucked the book back into his satchel, and moved to the threshold of the spiral stair.
Before he could go down to the lower vault to compare the upper thirty-two floor grooves against the twelve silver bed-strips with Mina, he needed an exact physical measurement of the twelve upright silver channels soldered inside the stairwell wall where they passed through the three nested brass threshold rings.
Seyun knelt on the dry granite crescent just outside the outermost brass ring. He took the two halves of Master Uren’s gray stone tablet from his satchel and laid them side by side on the frost-rimed stone.
Even split diagonally across the third rule, the carved diagram on the reverse face of the stone showed how a true Balance return array was meant to divide a mountain load across three voluntary grounding stones before returning the excess to the speaker’s own heel.
Chief Examiner Vaska Ren had copied the upper half of that shape for the thirty-two outward floor grooves around Nara Soth’s knees. But where the three voluntary grounding stones should have met at the base of the stair, he had substituted a rigid brass collector ring and twelve living human chests.
