The second thunderclap from the lower gatehouse courtyard didn’t echo across the mountain slope the way a normal bronze gong or a powder-charge echoed. Instead, the sound seemed to suck inward before it burst. Pulling the night air toward a single point on the lower stone stair until the ears of every watcher on the middle terraces popped. Then releasing the tightly packed air in a short, brutal blast wave that snapped the pine torches in their wall brackets.
Racing out of the shattered clerk hall alongside Ilyra, his freshly bandaged palms throbbing against the strap of the leather satchel at his hip, Seyun looked down from the middle stone railing toward the main stepped avenue of White Heron Hall.
The outer timber gate had not been battered down from the outside. Its six-inch iron cross-bar had been pinched inward until the oak beams snapped around the bolt like dry cheese. Stepping over the splintered threshold at the head of twenty-four black-armored Aperture Court recovery troopers was Commander Keth Or.
He was a tall, square-shouldered man in his early forties wearing the sleeveless dark-grey brigandine and silver-inlaid gorget of a northern circuit enforcement commander. Unlike Chief Examiner Vaska Ren’s stealth operatives in the water tank shaft, Keth Or carried no short trench-knife. In his right hand he held a forty-inch, single-edged Court broad-blade forged of heavy grey mountain steel—and around the last six inches of that blade’s point, the falling snow didn’t drift to the flat stone slabs. It curved…
