Hall Mistress Soran didn’t shout a battle cry, and she didn’t hurl her ritual spear across the two hundred yards of empty mountain air. She stood at the front of the watching platform in her deafened silence. She simply shifted her weight half an inch onto her leading boot. Then she turned the flat of her white-ash spearhead ninety degrees to the left. She pressed her Mature Jade focus outward across the ridge like a mason laying a plumb-rule against a wall.
Seyun, standing six feet from her left elbow with his hands on the iron rail, felt the air across the entire southern apron of the mountain change thickness in a single heartbeat. Custodian Halen or Daro Kesh had released Bronze breath. Then, it had moved like an aimed current—a whip-line or a flat sword plane cutting through a room. Soran’s Mature Jade focus didn’t travel like a projectile at all. It settled over the whole upper hogback of the mountain like the weight of the winter sky itself, governing the space between the platform and the crag as if the two hundred yards of thin air were a single block of seasoned oak.
Up on the narrow outer lip of the Gable Crag, Senior Disciple Vane was in the middle of wrenching his wrists backward to pull his barbed steel spearhead free of the rock face for a second lunge at Ilyra’s throat.
