The sun touched the western cloud rim at five in the afternoon. That turned the sky into a fire of bruised purple, sulfur-yellow, and burned gold.
On the eastern terrace of Cloud-Rest, the wind had ceased its uneven howling. It settled into a cold, steady alpine draft that smelled of ozone, cordite, and crushed granite. The rubble from the morning’s skirmish had been cleared by the refugees into a low, four-foot breastwork along the ruined raised stone road, manned by twelve mountain auxiliaries with heavy crossbows resting on grease-stained sandbags.
Ren Vale knelt in the center of the terrace, his wool trousers soaked through with slush and grey stone slurry. For three grueling hours. Meanwhile, the lookouts watched the western gap, Ren and Marshal Ren had labored across the sixty-foot width of the central parade ground.
It was careful contract craft applied at massive deep-rock scale. Back in Low-Khorat, Ren had repaired shredded loan agreements, patched torn town deeds. Then he scraped out hungry interest clauses from debt-slaves’ scrolls. But here, the parchment was the living rock of the continent. The ink was a potion-made brew of packed iron gall, copper burning acid. His own blood, channelled down the fluted grooves of his mammoth-bone awl.
