With his backup mark channels clamped shut and his Early Jade endurance reduced to a narrow central thread, Seyun didn’t try to hold off the hub’s lingering pressure by burning more Jade breath. Instead, he rested his brow against the upright shaft of his ash staff. Then he dropped his internal rhythm down to the most elementary exercise in his repertoire. The deliberate, self-owned foundation heartbeat pause he had developed during eleven years at Coal and taught to Halin in the Hollow Summit vault, to Pera at the shepherd’s hospice, and to Joren beside the ruined check fire. The wood of the staff felt cold and solid against the sweat on his forehead, grounding his focus in the immediate six inches of space around his hands.
Outside the recess, the lower returning hub pulsed every five heartbeats. It sent a rhythmic wave of suction across the dark rock court designed to catch any weary fighter’s lungs on the natural turnaround between breath in and breath out. Down at the escape junction, Bel Sar recognized the pulsing rhythm from the spring-guardian crisis at Ash Reed and tapped the heavy butt of his broken staff against his boot heel to mark his own irregular breathing count. Inside the cleft, Vaska Ren watched Seyun’s shoulders rise and pause out of phase with the mountain’s hum, a faint flicker of cold and exact respect crossing the former Judge’s gaunt, ash-streaked face. For twenty years Vaska had catalogued inward-channel recruits as passive channels, never imagining…
