Standing against the western cliff spur with Hall Mistress Soran’s left arm braced firmly under her ribs and the deep third-watch blade gash across her back bound in Mina’s linen sash, Nara Soth looked up at the gathering column of silver-white light on the northern sky-slit rim. During the third watch, before the pale blade had cut her shoulder, Nara had spent the bulk of her leftover Listening Crown strength to sever half of that upper rim. Reducing the Measure’s overhead supply by half and proving that a freed prisoner could strike her former cage without re-entering it. Now, in the emergency caused by the breaking of all three lower test sockets, the upper sky-slit was trying to weld a temporary bridge of tightly packed white pressure across the exact lip of her earlier cut.
Had Nara tried a wide, sweeping sky-slash of the kind the old Counterpoise Sect masters used to perform for spectacle, the strain would have torn open the deep wound across her shoulder blades and collapsed her lungs on the spot. She had no intention of dying on the western ledge to make a dramatic picture.
Instead, leaning her wounded left side honestly into Soran’s braced shoulder so she didn’t have to spend a drop of breath on balance, Nara raised only her right index and middle fingers to eye level and condensed the last clean reserve of her Listening Crown training into a blade no wider than a seamstress’s chisel.
