When Steward Osen Tal stepped out from behind the shattered granite screen into the southern lane, he didn’t look like a hero out of a valley ballad. His grey wool service coat was dusted with white granite powder from the broken screen. A four-inch cut from a stray stone splinter was still bleeding sluggishly down his left cheek into his collar. And he held no weapon in either hand except the heavy brass-bound tally slate he had carried up from the lower storehouse.
Yet by planting his boots in the three-foot gap between the corner of the granite screen and the southern rim of the chalk circle, his body physically blocked the only direct line of approach to Mina’s kneeling spine.
“Out of the lane, Steward!” the lead Court halberdier barked, his iron-shod boots skidding half a pace on the silver floor grooves as he found the familiar face of the Court’s chief supply officer standing directly in front of his point. “Assistant Examiner Reth ordered the physician taken! Stand aside or be run through for obstructing a seal regulation!”
For fifteen years, that invocation of seal regulation had been enough to make Osen Tal lower his eyes and step out of any doorway in the northern mountains.
