Moving quietly from bed to bed with Mina and Mother Renn over the next half-hour, Seyun matched each of the twelve wired townspeople to the four dorsal return loops he had mapped in the stairwell.
The pattern was as cold and clockwork as an iron gear-train.
Loop One—fed by the topmost needle between Nara Soth’s shoulder blades—ran down the stairwell into Bed One (Halin), Bed Five (Vey, the young woman from the herb-drying sheds), and Bed Nine (Sela, the weaver’s daughter). Loop Two fed Bed Two (Pera), Bed Six (Tov), and Bed Ten (Borin, the terrace wall-builder). Loop Three fed Bed Four (Maren, the river-lock rope handler), Bed Eight (Dren, the older kiln-stoker), and Bed Twelve (Yul, the grain-mill stone dresser). Loop Four—the lower-back needle Nara had rotated by a fraction of an inch—fed Bed Three (Senn), Bed Seven (Kori), and Bed Eleven (Neth, the ferry-lamp tender).
“Look at the solder joints where the silver floor strips meet the brass cuffs on their ribs,” Mina murmured. She held a small brass oil lamp close to the side of Bed Two while Pera lay steady on the stone slab. She watched them with calm, dark eyes. “Vaska’s smiths didn’t wire all three beds in each loop in parallel. They wired them in series—Bed Two feeds into Bed Six, and Bed Six feeds into Bed Ten.”
