At Ember Wash on day 1283, the nearer body accepted a short visit to the comparison tables. The body beneath the far overhang did not.
The local interpreter repeated the two intervals from the human side of the arch. Kesh wrote the sounds separately. One answering pattern came with a movement toward the old broad ramp. The other ended while the darker body moved farther into its own passage, out of the lamps.
“Do we have permission?” asked the quarry representative.
“For the nearer part, perhaps,” the interpreter said. “Not for everything these walls happen to contain.”
They stayed where the limited answer could be honored. The request concerned reading the old human-side scale marks while the resting bodies were there. It did not ask to sample the pool, divert its water or follow the darker animal down a passage nobody had surveyed. If the nearer body changed its position or answer, the visit would stop.
Kesh had brought the copy of the request, not a paper supposedly proving a native obligation. Lessa and the quarry cooperative held the human property record. Neither document contained the right to turn another living body into an instrument.
Iven waited above with the lamp crate and the ordinary rescue line. The two animals were local to this chamber, distinct from Reed-of-Glass’s distant nursery, Keeps-the-Three-Runnels at Three Wells and the red-ridged adult resting near Pale Reach’s eastern valley. Their presence here did not make every Marcher a single speaker issuing the same permission.
