Kneeling inside the chalk circle at the center of the sunken vault, sixteen-year-old Halin looked up past the three-foot bronze test needle at Assistant Examiner Reth Mal. A thin crust of white rime clung to the boy’s eyebrows. His left hand was pressed hard against the side of his own ribs to keep his shivering from rattling the silver cuff clamped around his right wrist.
“You promised me at midnight, Judge,” Halin whispered, his boyish voice cracking in the cold air of the vault, “that if I held the first six fine-tuning cycles without fighting the wire, you would show me the release order for Senn and the others at the Hollow Summit.”
Assistant Examiner Reth Mal didn’t raise his voice or brandish his pronged Jade weapon. Instead, he lifted a second, smaller sheet of stamped parchment from the side of his bronze lectern. Then he held it up where the pale light of the revolving blade ring fell across its red wax seal.
“The conditional commutation writ signed by Chief Examiner Vaska Ren before I left the summit,” Reth Mal said, his tone as mild and reasonable as a schoolmaster explaining a shape proof. “Let me remind you of the exact arithmetic on the mountain today, Halin. So that your confirmation on the seventh latch is made with full understanding.”
