“If you pull Senn’s dorsal collar pin the way you pulled the others, his upper governing vessel will fold in on itself within ten breaths,” Chief Examiner Vaska warned quietly as the dawn of Day 7 broke cold and clear over the Hollow Summit—leaving four dawns leftover on Daro Kesh’s seven-dawn Early Jade echo.
Around the seventh couch on the northern side of the black bronze pillar, Mina, Seyun, Mother Renn, and Pera were gathered in the pale pink light of the seventh sunrise. On the stone couch lay twenty-four-year-old Senn, a tall, broad-shouldered blacksmith’s apprentice from the upper valley whose dark hair was already streaked with premature grey at the temples from sixty days of bearing the main counter-load behind Nara Soth.
Unlike the eleven younger testers, Senn had four silver restraint pins seated along his upper spine between the shoulder blades in addition to the bronze collar and the deep left wrist needle.
“I know his governing vessel wall is too scarred to hold its own arch unassisted right now, Judge,” Mina replied calmly, her fingers tracing the sunken, discolored tissue between twenty-four-year-old Senn’s shoulder blades while Seyun read the deep spirit vein structure with his Spirit vein Ledger. “For two months, whenever the pillar’s pressure spiked at night, Senn deliberately arched his back into the dorsal pins to take the weight off Sela and Yul’s couches. The silver pins wore four deep ruts across his upper back loop.”
