Across the Chamber of Permitted Shapes, the battle around the outer rings was reaching a ferocious pitch. Beside the bronze lectern, Assistant Examiner Reth Mal—realizing that Mina’s cold and exact honesty had broken his psychological hold over the boy on the stone base—opened the brass valve on his channel cable to its maximum stop.
A blinding geyser of pale Jade pressure roared up the flexible cable into Reth’s two-pronged fork-spear. That turned every clash against Hall Mistress Soran’s seventeen-copper iron spear into a thunderclap that cracked the slate tiles beneath their boots. Along the right outer edge, the two Iron-realm axe-spear-guards pressed Ilyra within four inches of the whirling pale blade ring, while on the left flank Daro Kesh’s forearms dripped sweat and blood as he battered the other two guards back from Mina’s stone screen.
Inside the chalk boundary on the central stone base, sixteen-year-old Halin was fighting a battle just as desperate inside his own rib cage—and losing.
For six nonstop hours since Reth Mal had locked the first six latches of the lectern, the northern test needle had been driving a ninety-beat-per-minute ringing pulse directly through Halin’s right wrist blood vessel and up into his heart-sac. The boy tried to tense his chest muscle or clamp his inward spirit vein shut by main force. Each time, the chamber read that muscular effort as a cultivated pushback stance and right away tightened the silver wrist cuff’s grip.
