Behind the four-foot-high block of dressed mountain granite on the western side of the Chamber of Permitted Shapes, nineteen-year-old Mina worked with the swift, un-shaking economy of a surgeon on a winter riverbank.
Out on the black slate flat stone slabs less than two paces from the corner of their stone shelter, the heavy iron-and-steel ring of Daro Kesh’s broken Bronze sword meeting Jade Retrieval Commander Keth Or’s seven-foot glaive echoed against the vaulted ceiling in a relentless, bone-jarring rhythm.
With every crash out in the western lane, fine white dust and chips of lime mortar rained down from the high stone ribs onto Mina’s braided hair and shoulders.
She didn’t look up once at the falling dust or at the violet-white sparks showering from the thirty-degree tilted ring of pale semi-clear blades spinning overhead.
Her entire world had narrowed to the torn wool of her brother’s tunic and the dark, rapidly swelling deep bruise across the seventh and eighth ribs on the left side of his chest.
Mina used her curved horn knife. She slit the blood-stiffened seam of Seyun’s undershirt from waist to armpit and folded the cloth back cleanly without jarring his left shoulder.
Across the skin four inches below his left armpit, the imprint of his own iron short-blade’s guard-knuckle was already turning a deep, mottled purple-black where Keth Or’s redirected Early Jade swing had driven the steel guard into his chest wall.
