Assistant Examiner Reth Mal bounded up the narrow spiral treads inside the black bronze pillar four steps at a time, his silver-mounted Middle Jade sword raised in front of his chest and his white trial cloak snapping behind him.
His math was the exact math of every younger officer on the Aperture Court’s inner council who had only ever seen Nara Soth as a line item on Osen Tal’s needle-upkeep claims:
For twenty years, the one-armed prisoner in the Listening Crown had been pinned cross-legged inside a circle of dark spirit-iron needles, her spirit veins tapped day and night to hold the northern mountain rift and her back scarred by stone channels. Even if she had managed to twist one anchor needle three notches inward to disrupt the lower pipe hub, she was still a crippled, starved relic whose slightest shift inside the brass threshold ring would supposedly tear her own channels and drop the roof on the beds below. If a prime Middle Jade judge reached the upper landing and drove the flat of a council tuning-blade against her collar needle, he could force the anchor pin back into its lock and collapse the escape in five seconds.
What Reth Mal didn’t understand as he rounded the final curve of the bronze spiral stair was what had just changed at the bottom of the column.
