The ringing spike from the north didn’t pass through the black bronze pillar and fade into the mountain granite as minor weather tremors did. It echoed up and down the thirty-foot shaft like a struck anvil. That turned the steady, low-hum of the tester chamber into a jagged, stuttering whine that set every iron buckle, copper bowl, and metal tongs tray rattling on the side tables.
Vaska Ren dropped the wooden counting rod and had both hands on Senn’s shoulders before the echoes of the first shudder reached the vaulted ceiling. Beneath his palms, the timber wright’s collarbones jerked against the linen shirt as the floor wire attached to his left wrist went suddenly slack and then snapped taut with vicious back-suction. Fourteen miles away in the Chamber of Permitted Shapes, someone had just broken the smooth circuit of Reth Mal’s substitute ceremony. And the northern array, starved of its central channel, was trying to haul replacement pressure straight through the mountain seam from the Hollow Summit.
“Breathe out through the teeth, Senn!” Vaska rasped, pressing two fingers of his right hand into the hollow just below Senn’s left collar bone to physically buffer the retrograde surge with a narrow pulse of his own late-Jade breath. “Don’t inhale against the empty pocket! Let your lungs empty to the bottom and hold the floor!”
