Chief Examiner Vaska Ren unfolded Mina’s oiled-paper chart beneath the wall bracket lamp. He held the sheet angled slightly toward his good left eye. For two full minutes the passage was silent save for the steady drip of snowmelt from Daro Kesh’s boots and the quiet, supported rhythm of Senn’s breathing on the chimney pipe pallet.
Vaska traced Mina’s upright pulse columns with a blunt thumbnail, pausing over the exact notation where the second-beat rebound had threatened the pleural lining on the ridge. Then his gaze dropped to the bottom margin where Seyun had sketched the sixty-degree scattering triangle of the three copper needles still seated in the black bronze pillar’s base stone inside the vault.
A faint, reflex breath rasped through Vaska’s scarred throat pipe.
“The boy placed the third needle at the minor around the heart return node to bleed off the ringing spike before it reaches the outer ring,” Vaska murmured, reading the Balance mechanics with the instant understanding of a Late Jade specialist who had studied return stonework for thirty years. “And his sister measured the rebound interval to the half-beat in a snowstorm without a brass swinging weight.”
Daro Kesh stood with his arms folded over his damp coat. He refused to be drawn into a collegial discussion of spirit vein craft with the head of the work-yard. Through the open stone archway twenty paces down the hall, the circular chamber of the Hollow Summit glowed with the muted, dark-gold glow of the central pillar.
