Seyun walked back up through the abbey courtyard alone, dropped the twenty-four polished stone steps with the brass animal fat lantern in his hand, and stood once more in the circular underground chamber beneath the collapsed quiet focus hall.
With Master Uren’s skeleton buried under the sunlit pines of the upper shrine and the crushed scraps of tarnished silver wire gathered into a leather disposal pouch, the underground room looked remarkably small. It was no longer a haunted sanctum of forbidden power. It was simply a twelve-foot stonework cellar cut into the mountain limestone, with dry drainage grooves in the floor and a cracked stone stand in the middle.
Seyun set the lantern on the bottom step. He took the birch broom in his right hand and began sweeping the circular floor from the outer wall toward the center. He swept up the twenty-year-old dust, the dry flakes of rusted silver, the crumbs of mortar from the bronze floor-pins. The grey ash from the animal fat candle he had burned here on the night he first copied Uren’s diagram into the back of his Account Book.
As he worked, he reached into his canvas shoulder bag and touched the wrapped limestone tablet of the Answering Spirit vein.
