The King Who Broke Heaven’s Tithe

Chapter 73 The Last Paid Evening

Tarek's hammer left a clean rectangle in the dust.

Daren watched him roll it inside his blanket. Around the shaft, the other workers counted their tools with the deliberate care of men who expected someone to search their bundles uphill.

“Six days,” Brida said.

Rusk checked the board. Beside her name, Berrit's and Edrin's carried the same six marks. He signed beneath them and gave Nera the completed account.

“No remaining work claimed under that payment,” she read aloud.

“None,” Rusk said.

Edrin waited until she had copied the sentence before breathing normally.

Berrit asked for his own copy to show Nera later, then remembered she was the one making it. He smiled awkwardly. She put the board into his hands anyway. He traced the six marks with a callused thumb, pleased to understand exactly where his promise ended.

The examiner noticed. His expression tightened, but he did not ask for gratitude. Outside, the two guards were already gathering the traveling ropes.

Daren wanted to ask everyone to stay. The words came easily in his head, dressed in all the sensible reasons commanders used when they needed exhausted men for one more night.

He let those words pass.

“Which supports need watching?” he asked Tarek instead.

The miner knelt beside Brida. Together they marked three wedges, the cracked landing edge, and a seam above the service passage. Tarek scratched a narrow line across each wedge and its bearing. If either half shifted, the mismatch would show.

“Dawn and dusk. After any tremor. Before anyone goes down.”

“What if we can't tell?”

“Stay out.”

He said it without apology. Brida thanked him.

Rusk removed his coat, folded it, and set it beside the signal board.

“I have provisions for ten days. My measuring kit is mine. I can remain until the forty ninth evening.”

“Under whose order?” Selka asked.

“Mine.”

“That isn't the same as permission to pledge the Summit's materials.”

“No. The shoring stays loaded. I can answer for leaving it. Anything we cut or consume beyond what's installed needs another agreement.”

He looked toward the mountain, where lamps were appearing along the suspended buildings. From this angle, the monastery looked almost peaceful. Daren could not see the anchors that held it above them.

“What happens when they call you?” he asked.

“They already did.”

Rusk's fingers rested on the pale patch where his stores seal had hung.

“I reported an operating hazard. My superior asked when the water would be released. I reported the hazard again.”

“And?”

“He asked why I was repeating myself.”

No one laughed.

Daren understood then that the examiner's choice was smaller and harder than a conversion. He still believed in the institution above them. He was remaining because he could not make its instructions fit the stone beneath his boots.

Brida agreed to inspect the supports. Berrit offered bench work after his household tasks, with hours recorded. Edrin asked whether supervising him would consume more time than his work saved.

“Sometimes,” Brida said. “Tomorrow we'll see.”

He accepted that answer.

The departure left six fewer bodies in the yard: four workers and two guards. Their absence changed the sound of the place. No hammer rang below the shaft. The signal boards leaned unused against the wall.

Tarek stopped at the gate.

“Don't let the clever part hurry the heavy part,” he told Daren.

Then he followed the others uphill.

At supper, Iven measured the barley carefully. Thirty six and a half pounds remained afterward. Two ordinary allocations, with scarcely anything beyond them.

Rusk ate from his own packet, alone near the shaft. Orin watched him for a while before carrying over a place board from the communal benches.

“You can bring your food,” the boy said.

The examiner looked toward Daren, as though a child's invitation might conceal a condition.

Daren moved his cup to make room.

Later, Selka found him examining the broken walking stick. Berrit had fitted a temporary splint around the split, but Daren disliked trusting it under his full weight.

“You almost asked them to stay,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Would you have accepted no?”

He turned the stick in his hands. “I wanted to believe I would.”

She sat beside him. Her injured shoulder still kept one arm close to her body.

“When I extended Tev's assignment, I told myself everyone could endure another week. I never asked which person had already endured his last.”

Daren let the silence remain. He did not make her confession easier by using it to praise himself.

“What do you want now?” he asked.

“For asking to mean something, even when the answer ruins the plan.”

Below them, Rusk's lamp moved across the first supported steps. Brida accompanied him. Two people doing a task that had taken six that morning.

The work would be slower.

It would still be work.

Before dawn, a bell sounded from the eastern track. Not the monastery's bronze summons: a small iron cart bell, irregular over the ruts.

Osric called from the lookout that Rovan was coming.

Daren rose too quickly. Pain caught his knee and held him against the bench until the first foolish surge of hope passed.

Then he saw the covered load beyond the gate.

Six sacks. A woman walking beside them. Two hired hands, each carrying a short field spear.

The woman stopped outside the bar and looked past Daren toward the drinking spout.

“If you've broken the spring,” she said, “you can start by telling me what my grain is supposed to buy.”