One inch from Seyun’s main neck blood vessel, the forty-inch grey steel broad-blade of Commander Keth Or hummed like a taut iron wire in a gale. Inside the second, crushing pulse of the early Jade Spatial Crushing lock, the air around Seyun’s neck was already so dense that the skin over his windpipe split in a thin red line before the steel edge even touched him.
Behind Keth Or’s back, Hall Mistress Soran’s white-ash spear was lunging forward through the mortar dust. But Keth Or had calculated the distance down to the tenth of a heartbeat. His broad-blade would shear through the twenty-two-year-old laborer’s neck spine and drop Master Uren’s stone tablet to the flat stone slabs half a pace before Soran’s spearhead could pierce his rear brigandine plate.
What Commander Keth Or had not calculated was the Place II page of the Account Book burning inside Seyun’s chest bone. Or the forty-two-year-old Bronze swordmaster who had just ridden a lathered post-horse forty miles up the frozen mountain road from Oran without stopping to breathe.
Daro Kesh didn’t shout a battle cry as his mud-splashed boots hit the top of the eastern row of stone pillars steps behind the fifth eight-sided granite pillar. A man who shouted before his blade arrived was a man who wanted an audience rather than a cut.
