One inch behind Seyun’s left boot heel, the three-foot-tall bronze test needle rose from the center of the white chalk circle like a live lightning rod.
Since Mina had drawn the three-inch silver restraint needle clean from Halin’s wrist blood vessel two minutes ago, the raw, un-stepped forty-percent pressure load of the northern mountain branch had been pouring continuously into the floor needle’s un-latched bronze base collar.
Arcs of violet-white stone static snapped and crawled up the fluted bronze shaft, while thirty degrees out of level overhead, the twelve-foot ring of pale semi-clear blades whined and hunted for a spirit vein to lock onto.
The heat streaming from the uncoupled bronze collar was intense enough to singe the wool hem of Seyun’s trousers and turn the frost on the next-door flat stone slabs into hissing beads of steam.
Every fine hair on the back of Seyun’s neck stood upright in the ozone-heavy static-electric field surrounding the central stone base. The iron guard of his short-blade hummed against his calloused palm as if the metal itself wanted to leap backward into the circle.
Had Seyun stepped a single inch further backward across the smeared white chalk line, the floor relays would have seized his Early Bronze channels instantly.
