The sun of the seventh day sank into a band of copper and violet clouds above the western peaks. Then, the long expedition column stepped off the Hollow Summit and began its descent down the wide southern snow trail toward the abandoned first seal court in the foothills below.
Behind them on the empty mountain platform, the twenty-foot black bronze pillar stood dead and dark against the twilight snow, stripped of its silver wrist-leads, its cipher chest, its Counterpoise Tablet. Every one of the human lives it had held in bondage.
Thirty miles north, high above the jagged glacier line, the quarter-mile ring of the one-lunar-turn dropping correction gleamed like a pale iron halo against the darkening sky. Twenty-nine days and eighteen hours leftover before its downward sweep reached the floor of the twelve valleys.
Yet Seyun walked near the rear guard of the dropping column where the switchback trail curved down toward the pine timberline. Then, there was no panic in the march.
In the middle of the column moved the four birch-frame litters and the supply sledges. Twenty-four-year-old Senn rode on the lead litter with his upper spine held straight and pain-free inside Mother Renn’s ash-and-leather brace, talking quietly with sixteen-year-old Halin and fourteen-year-old Sela. They walked wrapped in sheepskins beside him. All twelve of the substitution testers were moving down the mountain alive, breathing in their own uneven, untuned rhythms under the watchful eyes of Mina, Mother Renn, Pera, and the three Ash Reed hospice survivors.
