Three paces upslope from Seyun’s front boot, the lower returning hub spun above its carved bedrock basin. The main eastern returning plane had snapped shut when Daro Kesh threw Keth Or clear. Even so, the eight-inch iron wedge Vaska Ren had hammered into the near recess guide-rod was still producing a dying, one-breath eddy of slack current along the southwestern lip of the central drum. If Seyun took three more strides upslope right now and drove his ash staff and Elder Hesh’s copper needles into that dying eddy, he could still score a deep cut across the outer casing of the hub before the fourth breath expired.
And down in the eastern trough eight paces behind his right shoulder, Daro Kesh was bleeding onto the frozen shale with a bone-deep gash across his right thigh and a chipped short sword propped in the gravel, unable to stand on his right leg while the second pale blade of the upper ring dove out of the clouds to sweep the ditch clean.
Under the old rules of the Answering Spirit vein—the rules the late Counterpoise Sect masters had written down before their school rotted into silver-wire coercion—a fighter whose sworn rival was killed. Meanwhile, their mark was active faced the ninety-day turning to stone lock. A slow, lethal hardening of the spirit vein trunk that turned a fighter’s chest to stone within three months unless another worthy opponent replaced the mark. Had Seyun been a calculator of spirit vein survival, he might…
