At the mouth of the northern service passage. There, the crushed fine china of the wall relay lay in white dust at the base of the granite cobble, Nara Soth stood beside Hall Mistress Soran and looked through the cracked stone doorway into the northern holding chamber. The early morning light filtering down from the closed grey clouds outside reached just far enough across the threshold to light up the three six-inch flat stone slabs she had split down the middle ten minutes ago.
Resting her scarred right fingertips lightly against the outer granite door post—without stepping inside the room—Nara listened with her Listening Crown sensitivity to the deep stone beneath the cracked floor slabs.
Three yards down in the unworked mountain bedrock, the last faint heat wisps of the grounded fourth-watch surge were scattering harmlessly into the broad, cold granite mass of the peak, like a bucket of warm water poured into a winter river. There was no rhythm left in the stone, no sixty-breath pulse, and no upward suction toward the sky.
In the old sectarian tales of mountain seals, whenever an ancient array was broken or quieted, someone always had to stay behind on the summit as a solitary guardian. A tragic immortal sitting cross-legged in the snow for a hundred years to watch the crack in the floor while everyone else went down to live in the warm valleys.
