Unfastening the heavy leather loop at his hip, Vaska Ren laid his tool beside the ash diagram on the shelter stone. It wasn’t a cultivated treasure, a rune-inscribed sect spike, or even one of the dull-bronze archive needles from his sample packet. It was an eight-inch quarryman’s splitting wedge of plain, cold-forged grey iron, half an inch thick at the polled butt and narrowed to a stubborn chisel edge at the point. The exact tool Vaska had picked up from the mason’s shed behind Mina’s lower hospice before the climb.
Looking across the stone slab at Vaska’s iron wedge, Daro Kesh pointed the tip of his short sword toward the sketch of the central returning hub thirty paces upslope. “Now that four of us know the four-beat commutation rhythm,” Daro said, his voice eager for the main target, “can you take that wedge up the center trough with Seyun and drive it straight into the central drum’s governor collar on the first pass?”
In a story built on reckless bravado, the former Chief Judge would have nodded solemnly and promised to crack the heart of the mountain array in a single redeeming charge. Instead, Vaska Ren looked at Daro as if the Oran swordmaster had just suggested swimming up a frozen waterfall in iron armor.
