Fourteen miles south of the northern seal, the underground vault of the Hollow Summit smelled of cold animal fat, boiled willow bark. The dry metal ozonic tang that always clung to the black bronze pillar when snow stacked heavy against the upper ridge. Twelve narrow stone beds radiated outward from the column’s eight-sided base like the spokes of a buried wheel. Five of those stone frames lay stripped to their bare cedar slats, the wool ticking rolled neatly at the foot and the brass floor clips unlatched where silver wrist wires had once run into the stone channels.
Chief Examiner Vaska Ren stood between the fourth and fifth occupied cots with a slender rod of plain ash wood balanced across his open palms. He didn’t wear his formal high-collared Court surcoat. It hung folded over the back of the clerk’s stool near the coal fire bowl. That left him in a plain grey linen tunic whose open neck exposed the puckered, pale-violet ridge of old burn tissue across his throat. Every third breath, he tapped the ash rod lightly against the side of his boot—not to impose the pillar’s downward rhythm, as the junior technicians had been trained to do for twenty winters, but to mark the quiet, ragged interval between one pulse wave and the next.
