Seyun kept his knees braced against the rough stone of the recess mouth. He turned the full test discipline Mina had drilled into him onto the warm current pressing through Place I and Place II. He first discovered Master Uren’s stone tablet before the silver-wired skeleton beneath the Monastery of the Last Question. Then, and later when he copied its rules into the back pages of his Account Book under Mina’s watchful eye at the ferry landing, he had learned that the Answering Spirit vein was governed by strict, non-negotiable boundaries. Those rules were not decorative lore. Tonight, under the crushing glare of the northern sky-slit, they served as a cold and exact instrument to separate truth from coercion. He didn’t need the physical pages of his ledger in his hand to recite the exact conditions under which a sworn rivalry mark could lawfully carry an echo into his return pathways.
Outside the granite overhang, two of the three pale blades skimmed low across the dark rock trough, their keen edges kicking up plumes of frost and crushed stone as they tried to herd Seyun’s attention back toward the easy path. Down by the escape junction, Bel Sar shifted his grip on the heavy iron metal ring of his broken staff and called out a steady count of the blade passes so Ilyra and Daro could rest their eyes between sweeps. Inside the shelter, Vaska Ren watched Seyun’s collarbones closely, his right hand resting near his packet of sample test…
