Breath Twenty-Six. Breath Twenty-Seven. With his Flame mantle scattered into the cold morning air and his right thigh bleeding down into his boot top, Seyun had nothing left to rely upon except the bare, unornamented skeleton of the twelve base forms he had practiced for eleven years.
He limped backward two short, flat steps along the southern arc of the white lime circle. That kept his elbows tucked tight against his floating ribs so his torso and the shallow reed bowl moved as a single unit. His left heel now sat barely eight inches inside the southern chalk boundary.
He couldn’t retreat another step without crossing the line and forfeiting the challenge. He couldn’t lunge to his right because the torn muscle in his right thigh had lost half its lateral spring. Seeing the challenger pinned against the southern boundary with two breaths left on the glass, Bel Sar committed his full six years of Bronze power to a single, decisive finishing stroke on Breath Twenty-Eight.
Instead of striking the stone three paces away, Bel Sar stepped inside five feet and whipped the iron-shod tip of his waxwood staff in a low, ground-shearing level sweep that skimmed half an inch above the granite flat stone slabs. The flight path was calculated with veteran care.
