The heavy canvas sack struck the stone table with a loud, metal crash. Instructor Yul pulled the bottom corners up. Then, thirty pounds of broken bronze and dull gray iron spilled across Arbiter Venn’s unrolled charter diagram. The pried-out bronze housings of all three human substitution sockets, the copper wall bar Ilyra had smashed flat with a granite cobble, three yard-long crescents of the collapsed blade ring. The palm-sized three-sided piece of the split inner hub where Seyun’s second-breath cut had cut the test joint.
Arbiter Venn stepped back half a pace as a jagged half-metal tube of Socket Two rolled against his wrist, still crusted with old lime mortar from the northern chamber floor.
Beside the pile of dead metal, Master Bren of the West Scree School laid the padded oak case of the practice court’s test lens and unrolled the signed proof charts from the seventh dawn.
“My school and Instructor Yul’s hold no charter lease from White Heron Hall and owe no tithe to Ash Reed,” Master Bren said. His voice carried clearly across the quiet gravel yard. “Two mornings ago—at the exact first quarter-hour of the seventh dawn when your manual says the northern rig renews its descent—we carried this tuned double-quartz lens up the service path to the Chamber of Permitted Shapes and into the northern vault itself.”
