For two four-beat pulses of the bronze pillar, no one in the lower vault spoke.
Then, from the star-lit stone dome twenty feet above the spiral stair, Nara Soth’s rough, unrushed voice carried down the hollow bronze pipe. It was clear enough for every villager on the twelve stone beds and every martial artist on the floor to hear.
“He didn’t invent the fire in the sky, boy,” Nara Soth called down from inside her ring of thirty-six iron needles. “Give the devil his honest due on the ledger page: the sky-shear above this peak is real. It has been growing heavier for twenty winters.”
At the foot of the center aisle, Vaska Ren lifted his chin slightly toward the stairwell opening, the silvery burn scars on his throat pulling taut as he listened to the prisoner he had kept in iron for twenty years confirm his premise.
“Tell them how fast the upper pressure has risen since the twelfth winter, Nara,” Vaska Ren called up the shaft, speaking to her not as a jailer to a convict, but with the grim familiarity of two engineers watching the same dam crack.
“Twelve percent heavier every winter solstice for the last five years,” Nara Soth’s voice came back down the bronze column without pause. “When Vorn and Marok died in the burning keep twenty years ago with their cut Jade channels bursting ungrounded, the backlash tore the upper spirit vein canopy above Hollow Summit. Back then, the shear only gathered over…
