Reth Mal’s Middle Jade thrust was fast, straight. Then he backed by every ounce of trial orthodoxy he had mastered in the capital’s inner college.
In the lower vault two minutes earlier, that exact linear Jade squeezing had split Daro Kesh’s ten-year-old Bronze sword lengthwise down its fuller and torn Ilyra’s shoulder stitches open on a glancing bending. Against any Bronze or Early Jade fighter in the northern valleys, driving that thirty-six-inch silver-mounted enforcement blade up a narrow stairwell would have been an unanswerable execution stroke.
Against Nara Soth, it was like throwing a land-mapper’s measuring rod at a landslide.
Nara didn’t draw a weapon, she didn’t step outside the needle ring, and she didn’t use the broad, room-shaking Crown defenses that would have pulled on the seven leftover tester beds downstairs.
Reaching out only her bare, calloused right hand between the frost-rimed bronze needles while turning her right heel two inches inside the limestone curb of the lattice, Nara Soth joined two contradictory intentions that no Jade fighter on earth could hold in the same breath. The downward-falling freezing wind of the overhead sky-slit, and the upward-ringing metal shaking of the black bronze stairwell beneath Reth Mal’s own boots.
