Senior Elder Tor Ves stood on the stone steps above the drained basin. He looked down at his own animal fat-bandaged forearms, at the cracked flat stone slabs of the three-hundred-year-old stone spring that paid for every roof tile on Ash Reed Mountain, and finally at the mud-caked Court rider demanding that Ash Reed’s guards attack a woman who had just won a witnessed single-combat trial.
Ten minutes earlier, when the rider still held the brass locator metal tube and the outcome was uncertain, Tor Ves had been ready to wave the man off the mountain quietly to avoid offending Assistant Examiner Reth Mal’s faction on the inner council. Now, the arithmetic of self-interest had flipped fully on its head. Twenty-four visiting town healers and three licensed Oran guild tax clerks on the upper walkway had just written into their official market dockets that an Aperture Court enforcement officer had carried an illegal spirit vein-resonating device into a chartered sickroom, ripped a foreign spark out of Tor’s own nephew-student, nearly destroyed the mountain’s earth-heat vein, and then lost a formal proof duel under Article Seven.
If Tor Ves ordered his guards to break the duel terms now in front of the Oran guild, every apothecary and village buyer in the river valleys would boycott Ash Reed’s spring market as a lawless Court guard post. Reth Mal would still blame Tor for losing the locator device and exposing the winter exam spark. Conversely, if Tor stood on the ancient legal high…
