The air around the base of the black bronze pillar changed heat in a single heartbeat—not growing warmer like Seyun’s Flame, nor cold like the mountain draft from the hall, but sharpening with the dense, flat weight of Daro Kesh’s Deeper Bronze sword intention. He had drawn his blade only three inches from the sword sheath. But the dark plane of his resolve extended across the stone aisle between Beds Three and Four, lined up directly with the main brass collector ring where all twelve silver rib-wires joined the stone base.
Seyun felt the corresponding mark beneath his right collarbone sting as Daro’s breathing dropped into his combat stance. The swordsman was not looking at Osen Tal anymore. He was staring at the soldered brass sockets where Maren’s and Senn’s wires met the column.
Seyun knew what Daro was seeing. Back at the school under the black roof north of Oran, when the Aperture Court revoked Daro’s teaching license and forced his students to practice an approved substitute breathing method, his young student Kes had suffered torn chest channels. That was because the Court’s manual demanded uniform rule-following regardless of a student’s anatomy. Hearing that the same institution had wired twelve people to a post and taught them to suffocate their own reflexes as a method of survival had pushed Daro past words.
