The link opened at the second hour of Hearth’s night, in the keeper’s chamber, with the whole wall lit.
Mara had been in the chamber before. Twice, to read Cant’s load figures for the brace. It was a long low room off the forge passage, down the stair beneath the shrine, paneled in old grey alloy, with the control wall taking up the whole far end: a field of small square displays set edge to edge, hundreds of them, most of them dark most of the time. Cant spoke from the wall. It had no face. When it read figures, the displays nearest the center lit in sequence, one per number.
Tonight every display was lit.
It made the chamber brighter than Mara had ever seen it. The grey alloy panels caught the light and threw it back, and the long room, which usually felt like a cellar, felt like a forge with every door open. The air was warm from the displays. Somewhere behind the wall, a fan she had never heard before was running hard.
An observer from the Compact sat on a folding stool at the chamber’s side, a young clerk with a slate on her knee who had come down the shrine stair an hour ago and given her name and nothing else. She kept her eyes on her slate. She had been told to record, and she recorded.
