Between the fifth breath and the sixth, the cold air of the seal court seemed to stand still around the swaying hemp cord. Seyun’s eyes—trained by eleven years of foundation shape and sharpened by four months of fighting opponents stronger than himself—measured the slanted lane Nara Soth’s wide outer sweep had left uncovered on the eastern side of the tablet.
The opening was not an illusion. Because Nara only had a single right arm and was bringing her walking staff around in a broad backhand arc to touch the western face of the hanging stone, her wrist had to travel forty inches through the mist. From where Seyun stood beside the eastern pillar, the straight slanted line across the inside of her shoulder to the tablet’s cord was only thirty-two inches.
At ordinary Deeper Bronze speed, starting two paces off the center line, his ash staff would arrive half a finger-width too late to stop her metal ring from clicking against Master Uren’s slate. Unless he abandoned his rhythmic breath out, locked his glottis. Then he drove an unbuffered burst of Deeper Bronze force at the same time through his right collarbone channel and his healing left between-rib return path to launch a flat, diving lunge across the flat stone slabs.
