The pressure pressing through Seyun’s left and right collarbones didn’t arrive with the jagged, bone-jarring impact of a pale blade striking stone. Instead, the lower returning hub imitated the exact body sensation of a completed training breakthrough. Flowing inward toward his heart with a smooth, easy warmth that felt nothing like an attack. Seyun remained on one knee at the lip of the dark rock recess, his fingers white around the shaft of his ash staff as the foreign current slipped past the outer skin of his shoulders and sought the deep return trunks of his spirit veins. Frost crystals along the granite overhang above his head melted in the pale glare, dripping cold water onto his knuckles. Meanwhile, the spinning bronze drum thirty paces upslope tuned its hum to match the rhythm of his lungs. Every nerve in his tired limbs registered the sudden, uncanny absence of strain, as though an unseen hand had lifted a hundred-pound pack off his spine in the middle of the climb.
Across the narrow shelter, Vaska Ren noticed the sudden stillness in Seyun’s stance and struck the heel of his right boot twice against the slate floor to warn the others. Unable to project his ruined voice over the wind after sacrificing it at the lower shrine six nights earlier, the former Chief Judge lifted his uninjured right hand and mimed the motion of a needle sliding into a collar joint, then drew a flat palm across his own chest. Keth Or understood…
