A man who fights for practical advantage. It was like Senior Examiner Keth Or, who had calculated the unfavorable shape of the room twenty minutes ago. Then he pulled back up the northern stairs to preserve his skin—knows how to recognize. Just then, a position is lost.
Assistant Examiner Reth Mal had never fought for mere practical advantage.
Reth stared down at the broken. Then, unlit half-shaft of his ritual weapon and the dead bronze cable smoking on the flat stone slabs beside his boots, what rose in his chest was not the rational caution of a defeated officer, but the choking panic of a believer watching the sky refuse to obey his catechism.
For twelve years, since he had entered the Aperture Court’s inner college as its youngest top-scoring tester, Reth had been promised one total bargain. That if he pared away every irregular personal impulse, learned by heart every Permitted Shape. Then he enforced the substitution lattice without pity, the rig would grant him unbeatable certainty. People who deviated from the diagram were supposed to break. People who held the cable were supposed to prevail.
Instead, inside the space of half an hour, a deaf Hall Mistress had thrown away her charter bell, a river-ward schoolmaster had crossed into Early Jade on top of his floor runes and smashed his channel with a bladeless handle, a middle-aged supply clerk had taken an axe-spear in the ribs to shield a back-street healer. An unchained Crown prisoner was holding the…
