The chamber had gone quiet in the way a room goes quiet when everyone has run out of patience and started hoarding it for later.
Five women sat along the curved lounge, each one with a chin in her palm, each one sighing at a slightly different rhythm so that the room sounded like a small, miserable orchestra of wind. Two hours. Two full hours of watching their husband sit at the workbench, naked but for a towel, hunched over a pile of metal pieces like some obsessive dwarf smith, engraving marks into them with a needle of glowing amethyst light.
Around his workspace lay more than four sets of what looked like handcuffs, if handcuffs were designed by a jeweler with a sense of humor. Rings. Bangles. Elegant bands of pale metal, twenty of them in total, each one slowly filling up with runic script so fine it looked like frost patterns on a window.
