Mina didn’t need more than two heartbeats with her index and middle fingers pressed against the hollow below Halin’s right jaw to verify what Nara Soth had seen in the ring’s shape. Even with the main right-wrist needle lying disconnected on the flat stone slabs, the four backup restraint pins were not passive metal tacks. They had been driven into the boy’s return gates. Meanwhile, the overhead pale blade ring was already spinning at full Crown tension.
As a result, Halin’s own inward-closing return pathway was currently braided directly through the rotation of the twelve semi-clear blades above his head. It was like a living warp thread woven through a moving iron loom.
“If you shatter the ring while those four pins are seated,” Mina said, her voice dropping into the crisp, unsparing register she used when stopping an apprentice from cutting a live artery in Oran, “the sudden snap in tension will rip his around the heart return straight out through the collar gates. He will bleed out inside his own chest before he hits the stone.”
“Just so,” Nara said grimly. “And I didn’t walk through four miles of granite to finish Reth Mal’s murder for him with a clumsier hammer.”
