Ninety seconds.
In the smoke-thickened doorway between the back passage and the kitchen, Lady Signe Lorr staggered past with two brimming leather fire buckets sloshing cold well-water over her blue velvet skirts. She paused for a single instant at the threshold of the treatment room, her face streaked with black soot and her dark eyes wide as she looked at the blue stone-script hanging above Jon’s frosted pewter bowl:
MIGRATION OF SAVE-POINT ANCHOR — 80% TIME TO COMPLETE ANCHOR LOCK: EIGHTY-FIVE SECONDS
“Eighty-five seconds, Master Hale!” Signe shouted over the crackle of burning pine lath, hurling the first bucket of water across the outside of the pantry flour bins to keep the floating meal dust from flashing before she turned back toward the pump for another load. “The legal transfer is four-fifths complete! If you release that basin before the hundredth mark, the custodial petition aborts under Article Three and the seal defaults back to the Bearer!”
Inside the treatment room, Sister Oda’s knees trembled beneath her grey habit as a dense roll of acrid yellow smoke poured along the ceiling beams from the kitchen and filled her lungs in the middle of the seventh stanza. She coughed hard, a fleck of black ash sticking to her lower lip, yet she forced her raw throat back into the builder’s cadence, her right hand pressed white-knuckled over the char-edged prayer strip (#3) on the floorboard while her eyes pleaded with Jon across the inner circle.
