“Reth Mal didn’t bring Master Uren’s tablet into this room, Nara Soth!” Seyun called back up the shaking bronze column, his voice hoarse with strain yet steady enough to carry past the clash of weapons in the aisle to the upper landing. “Reth Mal brought a council scroll that says a person’s breath belongs to the mountain seal! If I smash the tablet tonight because Reth Mal broke Vaska’s promise, then I let Reth Mal’s crime decide what’s allowed to exist!”
Beneath Seyun’s palms, the three copper needles trembled in their softening tin-lead sockets as Nara’s standing Crown focus pressed back down the metal wall.
“Reth Mal’s crime didn’t start in the Aperture Court’s capital chamber, boy!” Nara answered from the top of the stair, her single dark eye flashing in the cold starlight and snow falling through the sky-slit. “It started three hundred years ago when the fourth Balance master looked at Sel Oran’s notes on my rivalry and decided that if free opposition made one fighter strong, managed opposition could make a whole sect immortal! Every forcing wire in these twelve beds is a bastard child of the stone you’re carrying inside your coat!”
“And every distinction that just let Pera walk down that tunnel alive—and that’s keeping Halin and Yul breathing under my hands right now—came from knowing the difference between a bastard wire and an honest vow!” Seyun shouted back up the shaft.
