The hidden doorway behind Osen Tal’s cedar bookcase had been cut through the old load-bearing granite wall of the clerk hall forty winters ago. Just then, the First Examiner Council’s northern liaisons demanded a private water tank entrance that bypassed Hall Mistress Soran’s courtyard watch. The granite wall carried the weight of the slate roof and the upper archive floor beams. Because of that, the masons had propped the four-foot opening with two thick upright posts of seasoned cedar pinned into a heavy stone top door beam with iron wood slot-pegs.
It was forty inches wide. It was wide enough for two black-cloaked Court operatives to lunge through side by side, and wide enough for the reinforcements clattering down the water tank ladder behind them to flood the twelve-foot study in thirty seconds.
Through the swirling curtain of blazing bright birch ash, the second Court operative saw Ilyra shift her stance toward the bookcase frame. Realizing what she intended before his ash-blinded partner could recover from the floor, the operative lunged across the corner of the rosewood table. She drove his heavy-backed trench blade in a two-handed level cleave aimed at the side of Ilyra’s neck to force her onto the defensive.
