Mara’s fingers had cramped around the pen.
She sat at the yard office’s desk with a sheet of guild drafting paper in front of her and a pen she had been gripping for an hour, sketching the network. Her own drawing, nothing like the chorus’s lattice: the six active lamps, Hearth at the center of the route, the others around it, and at each one a small circle for a seventh-channel return and a small square for its governor, linked by lines. Chain of returns. And beside each lamp, a figure. How much mirror iron it would need to line its return.
She added the figures up.
She had done it three times now. Each time the total came out the same. Each time it was far more than three samples. More than Sable’s shell could give, even with the large harvest. Ysol had said the sheets lay between the second and third layers of plating, a meter square here and there, grown over centuries. Mara had seen them glittering along the shell in the lock’s lamp. Enough for Hearth’s return, perhaps. Perhaps one more.
Not six.
She looked at the six circles on her sketch. At each one she had written the name of the lamp, and under the name, in smaller letters, the number of people the chorus had read aloud in Hearth’s shrine. She had copied the figures off Eshel’s slate. They sat under the circles like weights hung from a beam.
