Assistant Examiner Reth Mal had directed the overhead ring through his iron prongs. Then, the blades had moved with an office pause. Checking the floor runes, verifying the collar load, and telegraphing each drop by half a beat.
Now that the ring was hunting on its own, there was no pause at all.
The three pale blades came together on Nara Soth from three distinct compass points—north, northeast, and northwest—dropping thirty feet in the span of a single eyeblink to form a three-sided guillotine around the northern rim of the chalk circle. The autonomous array had calculated the simplest truth in the room. Nara Soth’s unlisted Crown training was the largest source of variance in the vault, and if she was erased first, none of the Bronze or Jade figures below could hold the ceiling back for long.
“Back from the northern notch!” Nara barked, shoving Mina and Halin a full pace southward toward Seyun with the back of her hip before turning on her heel to meet the sky.
She didn’t retreat a step until the children were clear of the splash radius.
She held her five-foot ash walking staff in her single right hand. She swung the staff upward in a tight, rising figure-eight. Not the wide, sweeping staff art of a man with two shoulders, but the compact, bone-jarring Half-Arc Ash Whip she had worked out in her mind during twenty winters of captivity.
