Sarev Tal Oradan's Arc

Chapter 2 of 5

The gate stood open now, but Sarev faced a harder lock. He knelt at the base of the third pier, where the old mortar showed between the squat stones. To repair it the builders' way, he had to match their recipe. Guess wrong, and his new mortar would pull against the old, and the span he meant to save would weaken faster. He scraped a thumb of grey material into his palm and frowned. "You're taking my stone after all," said Maedra Veyrhal. She stood over him, brass charter cylinder in one hand. The retired baroness had insisted on watching every move. She still expected him to lie. "A pinch, with your leave," Sarev said. "I can't rebuild a joint I don't understand." He opened his assay case on the maintenance road. Reagent bottles sat in rows, each capped a different color. He ground the scraping, wet it, and watched. The color turned muddy and wrong. He tried again. Wrong again. The old mortar held some ingredient his kit couldn't name. Maedra watched the failed tests with something close to satisfaction. "Your instruments don't know it either." "No," Sarev admitted. He disliked saying it. He sat back on his heels and studied the pier's face. Different courses, different colors. The builders had mixed more than one recipe over the years. Choosing wrong meant weakening the span he'd come to protect. "There must be a record. Keepers wrote things down. Somebody always writes it down." Maedra's jaw tightened. For a moment he thought she'd refuse. Then she turned and walked the maintenance road toward a low stone dwelling he hadn't entered. "The keeper's house. Nobody's lived there in forty years." She unlocked the swollen door herself. Inside, the walls carried scratched tallies and calibration marks. Sarev ran his fingers across them, reading generations of hands. On the deepest wall, one line repeated in three different scripts: the deep mix. Below it, a proportion. Sand, lime, water, and something more, a measure of bronze-black fiber drawn from the intake silt. "There," Sarev said quietly. He turned to Maedra. "Do you have a piece of original mortar somewhere sealed? Sheltered from weather?" She hesitated, then drew a wrapped bundle from a shelf. Inside lay a thumb-sized fragment, dense and old, threaded through with tiny bronze-black fibers. Sarev held it to the light. The fibers matched the note exactly. He ground a corner into his kit. This time the reagent turned clean and sharp. The recipe answered. He wrote the proportion into his notebook in his own hand, three times, so no one could argue it later. "I have your builders' mix," he said. "The deep mix. I can match it now." Maedra looked at the fragment, then at him. "So you can. And now you'll want to cut the pier open to lay it." Sarev closed his notebook. He hadn't thought that far. She had. "Yes," he said. "I will."