Morning light on the twenty-fifth day slanted through the high window row grates of Sister Merrow’s washroom. Then she fell across a bare, pale rectangle on the dark flat stone slabs where the brass Courtesy Arch had stood for twenty-four days. Four iron anchor-studs projected an inch above the mortar bed. It was surrounded by a faint ring of white chalk-stone dust and the bruised heel-marks left by Proctor Vane’s academy court guards when they had unbolted the fourteen clip-on bronze members under Master Davin Sorell’s emergency relic warrant the evening before.
Nobody in the back kitchen had covered the empty rectangle or moved the bread table over it to hide the scar. Instead, Foreman Eren Tal had screwed four wooden thread-caps over the exposed iron anchor bolts so no kitchen runner would trip on the steel, and had hung the flat-toned bronze Stop Bell on its usual oak peg directly beside the empty space.
Thirteen-year-old Tavi knelt at the edge of the pale flat stone slab border with a dry bristle brush and a dustpan. It swept up the last crumbs of crushed lime plaster the court guards’ pry-bars had flaked from the wall. Halfway through the stroke, the boy stopped, looked at the bare stone between his knees. Then he set the brush down with a small, hollow clack.
