The man who stepped out of the mirror didn’t look like a brother. He looked like an iron castle wall that had somehow learned to breathe.
He was forty years old, broad-shouldered as a draft ox, his heavy frame wrapped in an engineer’s double-breasted coat of stiff, grease-cured canvas. Plates of blackened boiler-iron were riveted across his chest and shoulders, held in place by thick buffalo-hide straps that groaned whenever he shifted his weight. Over his brow sat a pair of brass sight rangefinder glasses with swiveling tube-shaped lenses, and hanging from a heavy land-mapper’s baldric at his waist was a five-pound plumb-bob cast from solid lead, its point chipped from thousands of drops onto stonework.
He stood six paces from Ren, his heavy combat boots planted wide on the frost-dusted flat stone slabs. He didn’t look at Ren. He didn’t look at Mira.
He looked down at the flat stone slabs beneath his feet, his jaw working as if chewing gravel.
“Soft mortar,” the man muttered, his voice a dry, gravelly rasp that sounded like iron teeth grinding across slate. “River silt and unslaked lime. Three hundred years old, water-logged from spring thaws, and unbraced against crushing force. An eight-pound aerial carronade hitting that south cross will collapse twenty yards of low roof wall into the ditch.”
