Kaelen tapped the vibrating brass needle with his fingernail.
Tink.
The hollow metal resonated with a dry, hollow tone, sending tiny ripples through the dark red fluid coursing through the glass inspection bulb.
“Senior Brother Vance,” Disciple Milo croaked again, his head sagging against the iron collar. “Are we dead?”
“Not yet,” Kaelen said mildly. “Though if you keep mumbling, my water for tea will boil away, and that would be a tragedy of similar proportions.”
He turned his blindfolded face toward the intricate runic engraving circling the base of the needle housing.
Under his active 241x comprehension multiplier, the world slowed to a crawl. Three minutes in real time unfolded into seven hundred and twenty-three baseline hours of deep, unhurried array analysis.
Seven hundred hours of mechanical study, Kaelen thought, tracing the flowing bronze circuits with his mind’s eye. That is nearly an entire winter semester at the Royal Academy. The Censorate artisans used a standard double-helical siphon, but they reversed the intake valve to prevent blood coagulation.
