Inside the lower hospice cave, sixteen-year-old Halin knelt beside Mina’s stool holding the copper washbasin steady with both hands. Five days ago in the northern chamber, Reth Mal had tried to drive a ritual needle into the boy’s chest to make him a substitute human anchor for Heaven’s Measure. Today, as Tarn the cooper groaned through the final stitches on his right wrist stump, Halin’s narrow shoulders trembled once. Just then, the smell of hot blood and yarrow rose from the basin. Then the boy closed his eyes, took the deliberate one-heartbeat foundation pause he had reclaimed by speaking his sister’s name aloud. Then he kept the water level without spilling a drop.
“Good hands, Halin,” Mina said quietly, snipping the boiled gut thread and laying a cool pine-resin dressing over the stitched skin flap. Across the cave, Pera—the first tester disconnected at the Hollow Summit—was already directing four of the uninjured tenant farmers to sort the salvaged cedar planks and dry barley sacks brought down from the shrine sheds. Meanwhile, Senn watched from his pallet in his leather channel brace, counting breathing intervals for two of the younger summit recruits whose pulses had raced during the distant crash.
After Mina checked the bruising over Seyun’s fifth and sixth ribs—confirming that his backward fall into the terrace ditch had jarred the bone-skin without cracking the ash-wood splints—Seyun and Daro Kesh climbed the dark rock steps back up to the abandoned seal court. The afternoon sun hung low and pale in…
