Seyun stood at the western mouth of the central dark rock recess with Vaska Ren crouched behind his knee. He looked across the twenty-yard semicircle of frost-whitened stone where their four separated pairs now stood. Thirty paces upslope, the yard-wide bronze drum of the lower returning hub spun with a smoother, deeper deep ring than it had at the start of the watch, and high overhead the three detached pale blades were no longer darting between distant corners of the ridge. Instead, they circled in a single, tight, linked ring directly above the central dark rock recess, their flat faces angled inward like the jaws of a carpenter’s chuck closing around a single wooden dowel.
Nothing about their opening plan had been foolish on paper. They had left the seal court in four widely separated pairs specifically so Heaven’s Measure couldn’t classify them as a single sect formation. Yet Seyun traced the fresh boot-tracks and scorch marks in the hoarfrost across the slope. Then, he saw with chilling clarity how the mountain’s ordering engine had used their very loyalty against them.
The third blade threatened Vaska Ren’s scarred throat in the southwestern trench. Then, Seyun had abandoned the inner bus of Socket #1 and stepped three paces east toward the central rocks to shield him. The rebounding blade doubled the load on Hall Mistress Soran’s bending iron spear on the western cliff. Then, Nara Soth had stepped two paces down the ledge to anchor Soran’s heel. That brought the western…
