They stepped through the outer archway of the Monastery of the Last Question. Just then, the noon sun stood directly above the roofless rafters. In the quiet courtyard, the autumn bracken had turned the color of rusted iron, and dry pine needles carpeted the cracked flat stone slabs where Balance students had once lined up for their morning debates.
Stopping inside the entrance gallery, Seyun rested his hand on the right-hand doorjamb. The heavy squared top door beam block that he and Ilyra had lifted back into place and mortared with lime clay as Mother Renn’s witness fee before their first dawn duel during that earlier ordeal still sat solid and level in its socket. A patch of green mountain moss had begun to grow across the new mortar seam, blending their repair into the older stonework.
Beside him, Nara Soth looked slowly around the ruined court. She hadn’t stood inside these walls since the night twenty years ago. Just then, the Aperture Court’s siege engines and recovery squads closed the ring around the mountain. The night she had walked into Master Uren’s underground chamber, refused to kill him to free herself from his third mark. Then walked out down the mountain pass to draw the Court’s blades away from the lower villages, straight into the trap that put her inside the Hollow Summit.
