The dry crypt beneath the Scroll hall dais smelled of crushed limestone powder, stale lamp-wax, and the faint, sweet decay of old calfskin thick parchment.
Ren Vale sat cross-legged on a cracked sarcophagus lid, his hands flat on his knees. In the center of the stone circle between his boots lay the Speculum of Forfeited Paths. The hairline crack across its gold-silver metal frame no longer cried grey ash. Instead, it emitted a steady, low-hum silver hum that made the iron rings in the floorboards vibrate.
Opposite him, leaning his broad shoulders against a dark rock pillar, stood the Warden.
Ren-of-the-Trench had unhooked his foot-long iron key from his leather belt. He drove the chisel-edge tip of the key two inches into the mortar seam between two floorstones, planting it vertically like a land-mapper’s benchmark.
“Stop trying to balance three men on the tip of an ivory needle,” the Warden rasped, his gravelly voice echoing in the low crypt. “You were taught by low-city contract clerks who think power is a ledger with two columns. Credit and debit. Summoner and summoned. You tried to manifest two of us in the past. Then, your brain bled because you forced two fifty-year-old men into a single channel. That isn’t summoning, boy. That’s an arithmetic crash.”
