Two hours before the eighth dawn broke over the mountain, Assistant Examiner Reth Mal stepped out of the rock-cut detention cave below the hospice terrace into the freezing dark. His left wrist was still bound in rigid pine splints where Nara Soth had broken it in the northern chamber. But his right weapon arm carried a stolen iron short-spear taken from the outer sentry rack. Behind him crept the two outer-outer edge Court guards who had lifted the cell bar. Men who had spent twenty years patrolling the valley outer edge and who genuinely believed that Chief Examiner Vaska Ren’s newfound restraint would let Heaven’s Measure erase every town from here to Oran.
Nothing that had happened in the northern chamber had softened Reth Mal’s doctrinal certainty by a hair. In his mind, the disaster at the Hollow Summit and the destruction of the hillside shrine had occurred for one reason only. The rogue fighters had deprived the sky-slit of a single, commanding human focal point.
He intended to climb the old eastern service path to the sky-slit’s lower shrine before sunrise, kneel at the main test socket, and restore himself as the sovereign directing hand of the sky’s instrument.
