“Fifty-one!” the tally clerk’s voice broke off in a strangled gasp as he dropped his boxwood stick onto the southern podium and threw both arms over his head.
At the center of the circle, the brass lantern-cage rolled once on its dented side and came to rest against a dry flat stone slab seam, its hooked brass hasp sprung half-open by the sixteen-foot drop. Five feet away, Daro Kesh froze with his sword half-lowered, his grey eyes widening. He saw the snapped upper wooden peg kick the massive crossbeam outward toward the benches instead of down into the pit. Even at consolidated Bronze speed, Daro was set on the wrong side of the falling chain tackle to reach the northeast bench before the timber crushed the front row.
Seyun was already running—not toward the fallen brass cage, and not toward Daro’s blade, but straight into the shadow of the falling beam.
“Seyun, don’t take it upright!” Mina’s voice tore across the panic of the tiered arena as she vaulted over the low rail of the western bench, her medicine satchel slapping wildly against her hip.
Between the fifty-first and fifty-fourth breaths, time seemed to compress into the gritty friction of straw soles on stone and the groaning roar of two thousand pounds of seasoned cedar tearing loose from the rafters. Seyun didn’t look back at the stone tablet lying unguarded in the middle of the pit. If Daro stepped forward and picked up the Balance slate. Meanwhile, Seyun was under…
