For several minutes after Nara Soth finished speaking of Master Uren’s last stand in the lower archive, the only sounds in the two-tiered shrine were the steady four-beat thrum of the bronze column and the scratch of Seyun’s charcoal across his Account Book.
Seyun sat on the third bronze tread at the top of the stairwell. He placed the broken black stone tablet side by side with his open ledger on his knees.
In the star-lit vault above him, Ilyra and Daro Kesh stood quietly by the stairwell lip. She watched him compare the chiseled characters on the twenty-year-old stone with the notes he had just taken from Nara Soth’s living voice.
Down in the lower vault, Mina finished adjusting the warm blanket over Halin’s shoulders at the first bed. Then she walked back to the foot of the spiral stair to stand beside Mother Renn. She looked up at her brother.
“Read out what you’re writing, boy,” Nara Soth said from the center of the iron ring, her chin resting lightly near the frost-coated collar. “I spent twenty winters wondering whether anyone ever dug Uren’s stone out of the cellar ash, or whether Vaska’s masons crushed it for road gravel. Let me hear what the boy actually managed to finish before the roof fell in on him.”
