Hall Mistress Soran knew the exact arithmetic of her own body.
The old spirit vein injury that had deafened her twenty years ago had also permanently narrowed the upper dorsal return channel behind her seventh neck vertebra. In short exchanges of three or four breaths, her Jade training was as crisp and authoritative as any sect master’s in the three provinces. In a drawn-out war of attrition against a younger Jade opponent whose stamina was being continuously replenished through a bronze cable hooked to the mountain’s main seal pillar, her endurance would thin and fail within two dozen beats.
She couldn’t outlast Reth Mal’s channel.
Therefore, she had to make Reth Mal’s certainty—and the Chamber of Permitted Shapes’ obsession with traditional templates—destroy his weapon inside three exchanges.
As Nara Soth drove her ash walking staff down into the northern feeder groove behind them to open the final four-beat extraction interval for Halin, Soran didn’t open her duel with an unpredictable or unorthodox strike.
Instead, on the first exchange in the center of the vault, Soran stepped forward along the main silver floor groove. Then she carried out the First Cloud-Returning Sweep of the classic White Heron Hall manual. The exact, textbook Jade spear form that had been registered in the Aperture Court’s charter archives for one hundred and eighty years.
