They carried the first segment down the shrine stair at the eighth bell, while the donated units held Hearth’s load low.
It took four of them. The segment was a curved bar of steel and coil, one-sixth of the ring, as long as Mara was tall and heavy enough that Gell and Brisk carried one end between them and Tavin and Mara the other, down the narrow stair behind the bell tower’s base, along the copper-lined passage, through the gate that Cant held open under clause nine. The clerk from Halvek’s office walked behind them with his clipboard. Eshel came last with his case and his slate.
In the drum, the heart hung in its rings, whole and glowing, its lowest channel’s note trembling at the rim.
The old heart had a service rail: a ring of pale alloy around its equator, a hand’s width out from its surface, where the old brace crew had mounted Dessa Orrin’s ring long ago. The rail was still there. Its mounting points were still drilled. Mara had measured them on the day of the inspection with Tavin’s calipers, and Gell and Brisk had drilled the segment’s holes to match, to tolerance.
The crew brought the segment out along the walkway to the platform, and Gell and Brisk raised a scaffold beside the heart: a light frame of steel poles and planks, bolted together, that brought Mara up level with the service rail. Outside the field. The field began, Cant had told her, a…
