By midnight, two of the three animal fat lamps in the outer hospice room had been pinched out to save fat. That left only a single hooded wick burning beside Seyun’s elbow. Behind the heavy canvas curtain at the back of the ward, the three escaped Hollow Summit testers breathed in the slow, slightly uneven rhythm of recovering sleepers, interrupted every quarter-hour by the soft crack of cooling pine embers in the iron stove. Mina slept curled on a low cot near the medicine chests with her wool cloak pulled up to her chin, one hand still resting instinctively on the strap of her leather test case.
At the corner of the scrubbed pine table, Seyun laid Master Uren’s Balance tablet flat on a square of gray felt. The dark, silver-veined stone. Carried out from beneath the ruined Monastery of the Last Question, suspended above Oran’s wrestling pit for a hundred breaths. Then it returned by Daro Kesh when his outward channels rejected its curve. Felt cool and dry against his knuckles. Beside it, he opened his leather-bound Account Book to the clean pages following his Early Bronze breakthrough record.
From between the front boards of the ledger, he carefully smoothed out three torn scraps of coarse raw, unwhitened bunkhouse paper. They had been found tucked inside the hem of Senn’s winter mattress before Senn walked back up into the snowstorm, carried down the gorge by Pera and delivered alongside Senn’s dictated warning.
