Frost smoked off the black dark rock steps above the seal court as the eight of them climbed out of the mountain’s throat into the open night. Down at the lower shepherd’s hospice before the twelfth-night march began, Seyun had placed his stitched leather Account Book squarely in Mina’s hands on the worktable beside her boiled linen and willow-bark jars. He had carried that volume from the limewashed burial road to the northern mountain to keep himself honest about what he owed. But bringing paper and ink onto the ridge tonight would have been a way of clinging to old ledgers. Just then, the rock demanded empty pockets and light boots. Without the physical book inside his coat, he tracked the state of his body by direct sensation. Twelve catgut stitches pulling across the muscle of his left calf from the rockslide above the mule track, a clean linen wrap pinned tightly over the sword test cut on his right forearm. The three four-inch copper test needles he had kept from Elder Hesh’s defeat tucked into the wool binding at his left wrist.
Ahead of him and thirty paces upslope, the northern sky-slit split the winter cloud deck in an eighty-foot tear of cold, unblinking white light. Directly beneath that high rift, a yard-wide drum of age-darkened bronze—the lower returning hub—spun six inches above a carved bedrock basin, feeding three stone-cut channel trenches that radiated across the slope like the ribs of a half-buried wheel. During twelve nights of unscripted…
