In the cool stone stairwell outside the barred check door, Joren wiped a smear of black coal soot from his wrist with the hem of his tunic, his breathing still fast from the heat of the pit. “Give me your hand a second,” Seyun said. He set his ash staff against the wall and sitting down on the step beside him.
Joren held out his left wrist without pause. Seyun laid two fingers over the wrist blood vessel just below the thumb crease, listening with the test attentiveness Mina had drilled into him since childhood. Beneath the rapid surface beat of physical hard effort, Joren’s internal Coal breath flow moved with a dry, unrushed, slightly uneven rhythm. The clear pulse of a recovering spirit vein carrying only what its own lungs had kindled. Not a single thread of the fire spirit’s smooth, sixty-beat imitation remained in his channels.
Seyun let go of his wrist and nodded. “Clean. The vapor didn’t hook the scar tissue.”
Halfway up the forty wet limestone steps from the barred basement vault toward the noon sunlight of Ash Reed’s outer terrace, Seyun and Joren paused on the middle landing to shift the canvas sling straps across their shoulders. The three two-foot bars of spirit-hardened bronze-iron weighed twenty pounds apiece. Sixty pounds of dense, dark-veined metal knocking softly together inside the coarse canvas.
