polishing, getting ready for export

chapters/book1/ch06-final.md

@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
 
 The chandler's shop on the south side of the dockside district was shuttered at seventh bell on a Thursday morning, but the narrow alley along its eastern wall led to a yard in back — packed earth, barrel staves leaned against the fence, and the faint persistent smell of oak shavings drifting over from the cooperage next door. Leon had an arrangement with the cooper for use of the space, the details of which I'd never asked about because the answer would involve either money or a favor owed, and neither was my business.
 
-I found him already moving through forms — a fire sequence, low output, the kind of thing a dungeon raider did every morning the way other people stretched or prayed. Not because he was expecting company. Because readiness was the entry fee for his line of work, and Leon paid it daily without complaint or comment.
+I found him already moving through forms — a fire sequence, low output, the kind of thing a dungeon raider did every morning like other people stretched or prayed. Not because he was expecting company. Because readiness was the entry fee for his line of work, and Leon paid it daily without complaint or comment.
 
 He stopped mid-form when he saw me. One raised eyebrow. The rest of his face didn't move.
 
@@ -30,7 +30,7 @@ Leon uncrossed his arms. "Your anchoring is fine. Your channeling is fine. Every
 
 "You know academically. I'm telling you physically. Your fire used to move like it was angry about something. Right now it moves like it's filling out paperwork."
 
-(*He wasn't wrong. The sequences were all there — every rune, every gesture, every micro-adjustment I'd drilled into my hands between the ages of twelve and eighteen. The architecture was intact. The engine was cold. Three years of theoretical knowledge and zero practical application, and the gap between knowing and doing had filled with rust and atrophied muscle and the particular kind of shame that comes from being very good at something you chose to stop being good at.*)
+(*He wasn't wrong. The sequences were all there — every rune, every gesture, every micro-adjustment I'd drilled into my hands between the ages of twelve and eighteen. The architecture was intact. The engine was cold. Three years of theoretical knowledge and zero practical application, and the gap between knowing and doing had filled with rust and atrophied muscle and a shame I couldn't quite name — the kind reserved for people who were very good at something they chose to stop being good at.*)
 
 We worked for two hours. Leon corrected my timing on the third-form transition — I was over-rotating, compensating for speed I didn't have with movement I didn't need. He spotted the hitch in my fire-to-earth switch, which was costing me a half-second on every cycle. Small adjustments. The kind of thing a good instructor noticed and a self-taught practitioner missed because you couldn't see your own blind spots.
 
@@ -42,7 +42,7 @@ Then my lungs reminded me that I was thirty-two and hadn't sprinted since the pr
 
 "There it is," Leon said. What he meant was: *the skill exists, buried under everything else.*
 
-He called the session when my forms degraded past the point of useful practice. I sat on an upturned barrel and breathed like a man who'd just discovered that oxygen was a limited resource.
+He called the session when my forms degraded past the point of useful practice. I sat on an upturned barrel and breathed like someone learning for the first time that oxygen was a limited resource.
 
 "The technique is there," Leon said. He handed me a waterskin. "The stamina isn't. That's the problem. You can throw four, maybe five clean combat workings before the tank empties. After that you're a man with soft hands and good intentions."
 
@@ -56,7 +56,7 @@ He called the session when my forms degraded past the point of useful practice.
 
 The guild's equipment lending catalogue was a leather-bound document that the receptionist at 14 Greystone Lane produced from beneath her desk with the smooth efficiency of someone who'd been waiting for me to ask. She was very good at waiting for people to ask. I was beginning to suspect this was a core professional skill at Necessary Services — the ability to let silence do the work until the other person arrived at the conclusion you'd already reached.
 
-The prices were listed in clean columns. Rated rope: four silvers per fifty feet. Ward-resistance compound, standard: six silvers per vial. Medical kit, field-grade: eight silvers. Light source, non-magical: two silvers. The numbers had the particular quality of prices set by an institution that knew you had no alternative and had decided to be polite about it.
+The prices were listed in clean columns. Rated rope: four silvers per fifty feet. Ward-resistance compound, standard: six silvers per vial. Medical kit, field-grade: eight silvers. Light source, non-magical: two silvers. The numbers had the polished cruelty of prices set by an institution that knew you had no alternative and had decided to be gracious about it.
 
 (*Four plus six plus eight plus two. Twenty silvers for basic equipment. Half the job's pay, spent before I'd set foot in the Barrows. The guild's equipment catalogue wasn't a service — it was a lesson. Bring your own gear, or pay for the privilege of learning why you should have.*)
 
@@ -86,7 +86,7 @@ The back room was half again the size of the front and organized with the meticu
 
 "Greymarch Barrows," I said. "Retrieval job. Two floors confirmed, residual ward work of unknown age, possible fauna. I need standard field loadout plus ward-resistance compounds rated for pre-Compact construction."
 
-Jonael — Carter, I'd learn later, was what people called him — was already moving before I finished the second sentence. His hands found items with the absent precision of a man whose inventory lived behind his eyes. Ward-resistance compound: two vials, higher potency than the guild catalogue offered, pulled from the second shelf without checking the label. Rated rope: thirty feet, which was ten less than I'd have asked for and, I realized as he coiled it, exactly right for the Barrows' documented ceiling heights. Medical kit. Light rod — non-magical, ceramic-housed, the kind that wouldn't interact with ambient magical residue.
+Jonael — Carter, Leon had called him, and I could see why the shorthand stuck — was already moving before I finished the second sentence. His hands found items with the absent precision of a man whose inventory lived behind his eyes. Ward-resistance compound: two vials, higher potency than the guild catalogue offered, pulled from the second shelf without checking the label. Rated rope: thirty feet, which was ten less than I'd have asked for and, I realized as he coiled it, exactly right for the Barrows' documented ceiling heights. Medical kit. Light rod — non-magical, ceramic-housed, the kind that wouldn't interact with ambient magical residue.
 
 He set the items on the work table and paused with his hand on the last vial. "The third door on the second floor," he said. "How are you planning to handle it?"
 
@@ -140,7 +140,7 @@ He wasn't telling me I couldn't do it. He was telling me I wasn't ready, and I w
 
 "Forty silvers," I said.
 
-"Forty silvers," he agreed, in the tone of a man who understood that number and what it meant to me, and had decided not to insult me by pretending the math was wrong.
+"Forty silvers," he agreed, his tone saying he understood that number and what it meant to me, and had decided not to insult me by pretending the math was wrong.
 
 We sat on the barrel-stave fence at the yard's edge, passing a waterskin back and forth. My hands were shaking — the fine tremor of magical exhaustion, not fear. Leon's weren't. Leon's never did.
 
@@ -152,7 +152,7 @@ Of course he had. Leon had been everywhere that was old, sealed, and rumored to
 
 "And?"
 
-"It didn't work." A pause. Not dramatic — processing. Leon replayed events the way I replayed magical structures: methodically, from multiple angles, until the picture resolved. "The ward didn't absorb the inputs. Didn't counter them. It *routed* them. Like a drainage channel. I hit it with four hundred streams of noise and the ward just — directed the energy somewhere. Didn't resist. Didn't overload. The inputs went *through* the ward and came out the other side as heat."
+"It didn't work." A pause. Leon replayed events the way I replayed magical structures: methodically, from multiple angles, until the picture resolved. "The ward didn't absorb the inputs. Didn't counter them. It *routed* them. Like a drainage channel. I hit it with four hundred streams of noise and the ward just — directed the energy somewhere. Didn't resist. Didn't overload. The inputs went *through* the ward and came out the other side as heat."
 
 "Heat."