The moment Nara Soth shifted her right boot away from the dry granite walkway and angled her shoulder toward the eastern chute, Heaven’s Measure recognized the refusal.
An accounting engine had no capacity for anger. But the physical violence with which an array corrected a rejected bargain was impossible to tell apart from fury. Thirty zhang above the northern ridge, the hollow metal tube of silver light snapped out of existence. Within the dry six-foot circle on the shelf, the granite floor cracked down the middle with a sound like a felled oak splitting in winter frost. It sent a plume of crushed grey stone three feet into the air.
Overhead, the eight flat ribs of the Listening Crown lattice unlocked from their eight-sided seating frame. In less than half a breath, the eight spokes folded downward on their central hinges, their paper-thin silver surfaces hardening into eight ten-foot upright blades arranged in a tight, overlapping wedge pointed straight at the eastern half of the shelf.
“First breath!” Ilyra called out, dropping her balance point until her back thigh nearly brushed the frost-covered dark rock beside the second cairn.
She didn’t try to reach high with an eighteen-inch shaft. She knew that the broken stub gave her zero reach above her own head. She tucked the splintered ash butt tight against the front of her right hipbone and angled the two-foot iron spearhead upward at forty-five degrees. That turned her own torso and braced legs into the lower half of…
