He knelt on the frozen dark rock six paces outside the recess mouth. Vaska Ren looked at the near recess guide-rod with the eyes of a man who had watched it built. Young fighters from the lower valleys looked at the Aperture Court’s summit array. Then, they saw a seamless, mystical circuit of glowing lines and humming bronze that seemed to have grown out of Heaven itself. Vaska looked at the box-shaped guide-rod box under his knees. Then, he saw the work of the third foundry shift from the autumn of his thirty-first year. Two plates of quarter-inch cast bell-bronze lapped over an internal copper commutation bar and joined along the eastern pipe rim by a hand-hammered forge-seam of soft silver-tin solder.
Had Vaska tried to attack the cultivated channel running through the top of the bronze cap—the way a traditional sect swordsman would strike at the brightest glow of an array—the guide-rod’s phase-shielding would have bounced his uncultivated iron wedge off the surface like a pebble off an anvil. The cultivated channel was heavy by the full downward pressure of the eighty-foot sky-slit.
The physical forge-seam along the lower eastern pipe rim, however, had no cultivated awareness of its own. It was simply a lap-joint where human smiths with cold fingers had hammered hot bronze over copper twenty winters ago. That left a tiny ridge of softer silver-tin filler metal between the upper cover and the bedrock baseplate.
