On the seventy-sixth breath, Daro Kesh didn’t touch the brass lantern-cage.
With a single fluid motion that had nothing to do with tournament forms, the forty-two-year-old swordmaster slid his iron-mounted blade back into the sword sheath at his waist. It turned his back squarely on the undefended Balance tablet. Then it crossed the thirty-foot pit in three tremendous Bronze bounds.
“Seventy-six!” the tally clerk called out automatically as another red drop fell, before his voice faltered as Daro’s boots crossed the northeast boundary line right past Seyun’s stumbling shoulder.
“Kesh, the circle!” Examiner Vael’s voice rose to a shrill bark from the eastern gallery box. “Wait until the seventy-seventh breath and take the stone first—you have two hands!”
Daro didn’t even glance toward the eastern box. As the cracked pine tie-rafter sixteen feet overhead gave a second, louder crack and began to shower broken grey mortar and heavy clay roof tiles down onto the front row, Daro vaulted over the low wooden curb of the northeast bench.
Instead of grabbing blindly at the boy’s ankle and risking a compound fracture, Daro drove his broad left shoulder directly beneath the sagging belly of the cracked pine rafter. It caught the dropping timber and its load of clay tiles across his consolidated Bronze upper back muscle before the wood could fall another four inches. The heavy rafter hit his shoulder with a dull thud that drove dust from his coarse hemp coat. But his knees barely bent.
