“Stop him from touching the stone base!” Osen Tal shouted by the worktable as Daro Kesh dropped to one knee beside the southern face of the black bronze pillar.
For half a heartbeat, even Vaska Ren thought the swordsman had lost his patience and was about to repeat his first-night threat of hacking straight through the active tester wires.
Yet Daro Kesh was a schoolmaster who had spent the entire afternoon listening to Seyun, Mina, and Osen analyze the sub-floor cross-section line by line. He knew that cutting any of the eleven active outward tubes would kill Halin, Senn, and the others instantly. And he knew from Osen’s third charcoal drawing exactly what protruded two inches out of the service recess between Tube One and Tube Two at the base of the eight-sided housing:
The outer return latch—the outside brass clamping lever and locking pin that allowed Court technicians to open the twelfth socket collar and snap a replacement wire back into the common test needle without dismantling four inches of mortared limestone floor.
With his Deeper Bronze focus condensed into a flat, razor-sharp wedge no wider than a chisel along the last six inches of his dark blade, Daro Kesh didn’t strike the pillar wall or the eleven live tubes. He drove his edge straight down at a thirty-degree angle through the external brass locking pin of the twelfth socket’s outer return latch.
