Directly beneath the churning white ring of the northern sky, the half-collapsed stone pavilion of the sky-slit’s lower shrine hummed like a struck tuning fork. Frost three inches thick coated the broken dark rock columns, and at the center of the cracked flat stone slab floor sat the main bronze test socket Chief Examiner Vaska Ren had installed twenty winters ago to link the mountain’s outer veins to the Hollow Summit.
Shoving the two breathless Court guards back toward the stone railing, Assistant Examiner Reth Mal dropped to both knees before the bronze ring. With his braced left wrist resting against his thigh, he pressed his intact right palm squarely over the socket’s central sky-slit and began to circulate his Early Jade focus in the strict, metronomic three-beat rhythm of the Aperture Court’s sovereign command manual.
Every muscle in Reth’s jaw was locked with triumph. He believed with all his soul that the chaos of the past week was merely the result of weak-willed sympathy. That the moment the sky’s instrument felt an uncompromising judge’s pulse at the socket, it would yield its targeting helm back to his hand.
Standing three paces behind Reth with his shattered right wrist tucked inside its leather sling and a short steel side-blade held awkwardly in his left fist, Retrieval Commander Keth Or watched the white light pour down through the gap in the pavilion roof. Unlike Reth, Keth had spent thirty years watching how blades actually behaved before they struck.
