For the first time since Chief Examiner Vaska Ren had stepped through the oak doors of the lower shrine, his patient hands went fully still against the dark wool of his coat.
His eyes moved from Seyun’s face down to the brass chest-collar resting below Pera’s scarred left collarbone on the second stone slab. Then to the flanged junction where the second return loop entered the central bronze pillar.
“Explain your premise,” Vaska Ren said, and the judge’s voice was suddenly entirely gone—replaced by the sharp, hungry attention of an array-master builder who had spent four winters failing to solve a lethal equation.
“Your twelve beds are wired in four three-bed series loops,” Seyun said. He kept his explanation clear enough for the townspeople on the slabs and Nara Soth upstairs to follow. But withholding the exact three-person bridging set he and Mina had begun to calculate during the night. “When your clerks try to disconnect a bed by turning a brass choke-valve, the sudden drop in loop volume creates a sharp back-flow wave that slams back into the tester’s inward-closing chest vein while starving the central pillar of a twelfth of its ringing damping.”
“Which is why seven testers in the first winter died during tried mid-cycle removals,” Vaska Ren rasped, nodding once. “An inward-closing channel snaps shut like a pinched reed if the pressure drops faster than the vein wall can relax, trapping a lethal knot of sky-shear inside the heart-sac.”
