They carried Mira down into the deep underground archive beneath the keep, three levels below the flat stone slabs. There, the granite walls were ten feet thick and the terrifying openness of the sky couldn’t reach them.
The room smelled of dry paper, ink, sulfur salt, and old lamp-wax. Master Kroll had lit three heavy animal fat lamps, hanging them from the vaulted ceiling to cast warm, steady amber light across the central granite worktable. They laid Mira upon a mattress of sheepskins and heavy woolen blankets, stripping away her torn linen shirt to expose the living crystal of her chest.
In the quiet of the cellar, the sound of her injury was heard to every man in the room.
It wasn’t a heartbeat. It was an uneven, painful sound shaking. A dry, high-pitched tink-tink that sounded like a cracked fine china cup shaking on an iron stove. Every three or four seconds, the rhythm would falter, producing a dull, grinding scrape that made Ren Vale’s stomach clench with physical pain.
Brother Ren stood over her, his silver-rimmed glasses pushed up on his forehead, a pair of brass measuring tongs and a magnifying glass held in his soot-stained hands. His ledger lay open on the corner of the table, its pages filled with wild sketches of crystal-clear lattice structures and stress-fracture diagrams.
