“You used foundation venting needles on the three monk braze seams to stagger the load,” Nara Soth’s voice traveled down the hollow inside of the black bronze pillar, cutting cleanly through the clash of steel in the doorway and the hiss of hot solder beneath Seyun’s palms. “Master Uren always said a student who paid attention to his Coal basics would last longer than a genius who skipped to the roof.”
Seyun knelt between Bed One and Bed Twelve with his split palms pressed hard over the hot butts of Needle One and Needle Three. He felt the full, staggering weight of the woman standing in the Listening Crown forty feet above his head.
Nara Soth had been sitting cross-legged inside the needle lattice the night before. Then, her Crown training had felt like a snowfield resting quietly on a distant ridge. Now that she stood upright on her own feet with the main anchor needle turned three notches inward. She held even two-thirds of her divided return current through the copper needles felt like bracing a wooden shutter with bare hands against a mountain river in spring flood.
Every heartbeat sent a rhythmic, five-layered shaking—sword, wind, stone, river-turn, and refusal—coursing through the copper shafts into the raw clefts across Seyun’s palms, running up his forearms, and making his teeth ache in his jaw. Dark blood from his reopened palm burns ran down the three-inch copper needles and sizzled faintly against the hot tin-lead braze seam.
