“Vaska Ren has lost his mind!” Reth Mal’s voice cracked against the vaulted stone ceiling of the Chamber of Permitted Shapes, shrill with the particular terror of a traditional man watching the foundational axiom of his career step out of a wall. He leveled the twin-pronged head of his chamber-fed weapon between Hall Mistress Soran and the white-haired woman by the eastern seam. “He unpinned the Listening Crown! Twenty years of holding—twenty years of keeping the valley ceiling intact—and he turns the very disaster the Aperture Court was built to restrain loose inside the main northern seal!”
Behind Reth, the three surviving Court guards who had remained in the chamber when Keth Or pulled back backed instinctively toward the right-hand pillar line, their spear points wavering between Mina’s back and the ancient challenger.
Nara Soth didn’t right away raise her ash walking staff or flare her aura to intimidate the room. She kept her weight settled evenly between her boots and the iron-shod metal ring of the wood. She looked slowly around the frost-rimed vault. Her dark eyes took in the engraved kneeling silhouettes along the entry threshold, the shattered half-length of Ilyra’s marsh-iron spear, the linen rib-bindings visible through Seyun’s cut tunic behind the stone screen, and finally sixteen-year-old Halin kneeling in the center of the chalk circle with silver wires still threaded into his collarbones and blood drying on his wrist.
