Vaska Ren untied the leather cord and folded back the four flaps of the greased oilskin roll on the map stone. Then, the air around the table seemed to drop five degrees.
Lying on the dark oiled cloth in the lantern light were three nine-inch needles of tarnished, spirit-hardened dark bronze, each as thick as a carpenter’s awl and grooved along its upper shaft with spiral return channels, alongside a heavy, eight-inch plain iron wedge that Tavan had forged in the root cellar yesterday.
Ten paces back on the lower terrace steps—where Pera, Senn in his chest brace, and sixteen-year-old Halin had walked up from the hospice to carry the final water skins and spare bandage rolls before the ascent—all three freed testers stiffened visibly at the sight of the dark bronze instruments glinting on the stone.
Seyun felt his own jaw tighten by a fraction of an inch.
He knew those needles by touch and by blood. Eight seasons ago at the Hollow Summit pillar, when Vaska Ren had granted the twenty-four-hour release test for Pera and Daro’s seventh-dawn echo arrived, Seyun had split his own palms open holding Dual-Route Flame across the bronze collars where needles matching to these were driven into Pera’s wrists and collarbone. In the northern chamber, Reth Mal had tried to drive the master needle of this exact set through Halin’s chest to turn a sixteen-year-old boy into a living replacement for Nara Soth.
