The noon bells tolled twelve heavy strokes from the Seventh Spire, vibrating through the stone.
It was Day 14.
Inside the fifth-floor Inner Sanctum, the floating luminous pearls had been dimmed to a soft, watery glow. The chamber was warm and quiet, sealed off from the rest of the fortress by six-foot slabs of soundproofed basalt.
Beyond the reinforced threshold, twenty armored sentries held their spears perfectly still. Elder Mordan’s order to execute anyone who made a sound had turned the fifth-floor corridor into the quietest sanctuary in the entire city.
In the center of the sanctum, Kaelen Vance unrolled a crisp sheet of architectural vellum across the low ink-jade table.
It was the secret blueprint dropped three days ago by the Second Tower Grandmaster who had delivered charcoal to Furnace 49.
Earlier that evening, Deacon Vane had sent up a delivery basket containing forty candied plums and a brief intelligence summary from the outer bazaar. The report warned that Grandmaster Volkov’s personal enforcers had begun a strict audit of the outer spires, searching for unrecorded high-grade pills.
Kaelen ignored the audit rumors and studied the blueprint.
