For eleven minutes, the combined turn worked.
Iven watched the first pointer rise at Hollow Stair while the keeper counted the discharge into its ordinary receiver. The warm return arrived in a smooth, controlled band. It was cooler than yesterday’s untimed peak, and the old rattling pipe above the door had stopped striking its brackets.
Across the courtyard, a worker took off his cap and wiped his forehead with an expression of almost painful relief.
That was the part no one arguing against Venn could afford to forget.
The combined turn had begun on the morning of day fourteen hundred and sixty. Four regional returns were committed through the new central cylinder. Hollow Stair’s local catch had been connected to that system before the current dispute. A red-painted rod ran from its working board into the enclosed relay housing, where the new mechanism could hold the catch engaged during a combined stage.
The keeper had objected to that hold. The station order had set it at eighteen minutes.
She stood beside the visible local handle now, watching a second gauge beneath the first. Ama had come to observe the actual turn. Iven had come because the older return here shared a receiving passage they had traced from the upper survey.
