Seyun knelt inside the chalk circle. Meanwhile, the pale semi-clear blades of Heaven’s Measure hummed eighteen inches above his head. He studied the heavy bronze collar at the base of the central floor test needle. Six paces to his right, Hall Mistress Soran’s plain iron spear rang like a blacksmith’s hammer against Assistant Examiner Reth Mal’s channel-fed fork-spear. Six paces to his left, Daro Kesh’s broken Bronze sword ground iron sparks off two Court axe-spears in front of the stone dressing-screen.
At the base of the three-foot floor spike, three narrow venting sockets were spaced in an equilateral triangle around the bronze collar. The exact same three-socket shape Seyun had seen at the Hollow Summit bunkhouse beds and in the throat of the bronze stone guardian in the chimney fissure.
In the summit bunkhouse, and in the fissure yesterday afternoon, the Aperture Court’s standard ringing lock had operated on a three-beat outbound phase. If you pushed in three copper grounding needles into the collar sockets on the pause between the second and third pressure pulses, the collar vented its stored charge harmlessly into the floor slate and released the wrist wire’s tension.
Holding the three copper needles in his right hand and bracing his left wool-gloved palm two inches above the bronze collar to feel the heat beat of the channel, Seyun listened to the rhythm of the spike.
