The moment Hall Mistress Soran’s boots crossed the third nested bronze ring of the vault floor—where the inlaid silver recognition wires could no longer be bypassed at combat speed—a sharp chime rang out from the base of Assistant Examiner Reth Mal’s lectern. Reth snatched his left hand back from the seventh latch before it could drop, spun on his heel. Then he raised his two-pronged Jade fork-spear across his chest.
Because the butt of Reth’s weapon was socketed directly into the thick flexible power cable rising from the chamber’s backup floor channel, he didn’t fight with his own personal Early Jade pool alone. As he twisted the brass valve on the weapon’s collar, raw, stepped-down sky pressure from the northern mountain seam flooded up the cable into the two prongs of his spear, surrounding the steel tines with a foot-wide halo of pale, humming Jade force.
Even so, when Reth Mal saw the tall, grey-haired woman three paces in front of him—and recognized the stance of the Mistress of White Heron Hall alongside Ilyra, Daro Kesh, and Seyun—his clerk’s instinct reached right away for the weapon that had served the Aperture Court even better than steel for a hundred years: legal procedure.
