While Nara Soth and Hall Mistress Soran cleared the western rock seam under Seyun and Ilyra’s moving guard, Commander Keth Or swung his uninjured left arm beneath Chief Examiner Vaska Ren’s ribs and hoisted the gaunt, voiceless man up from the floor of the dark rock recess. Vaska weighed little in his torn, ash-stained Judge’s robes. His left hand tightly was bound in bloody linen where he had sliced away two fingers and his glove to escape the iron wedge in the second watch. Even with his own right wrist earlier shattered by Daro’s broken blade and missing two fingers from the lower shrine, Keth carried his former superior toward the southern exit lip with steady, practiced balance.
Yet as Keth’s boots crossed the stone trough at the outer edge of the recess, Vaska Ren didn’t look toward the safe gravel of the escape junction downslope. Twisting against Keth’s hip, the former Chief Judge struck Keth’s breastplate urgently with his good right knuckles and pointed straight down into the chiseled dark rock groove at their feet. There, inside the main test guide-rod that linked the outer sockets to the lower hub, the wrist-thick bar of bronze and silver wire was writhing like a cut snake under the huge magnetic suction of the dropping blade ring.
