A single moving flame inside a pitch-black stone enclosure pulls the human eye the way a whirlpool pulls a floating leaf.
Kes took his first three rapid strides northward from the south curb. Then, the three-foot yellow cone of his half-shuttered brass oil lamp glided across the frosted flat stone slabs, lighting up every detail in its path. The beveled edges of the granite blocks, a glistening smear of ice near the center drain, the white wool wrapping around the lower shaft of Bel Sar’s incoming pole.
When Bel’s heavy quilted staff came whistling out of the western gloom in a fast, chest-high level sweep aimed straight at the lamp’s glow, Seyun’s eyes locked onto the lit up wood the instant it entered the yellow circle.
His body reacted with the crisp, automatic speed of eleven years on the foundation tiles.
Gliding forward on a low, flat Returning Step that kept his stitched left calf well within Mina’s safe angle, Seyun drove Nara’s plain ash staff across the western edge of the light cone. His Deeper Bronze Answering Edge met Bel’s padded pole two feet in front of Kes’s chest with a solid, muffled thump. It slid the heavy seven-foot timber upward and left so the yellow circle of light around Kes’s boots remained fully undisturbed.
