Knowing that any try to seize Nara Soth or the twelve testers by force would start an immediate sect war that he couldneither win in this yard nor justify to the country charter houses without a functioning seal emergency, Senior Arbiter Venn made one final effort to salvage an asset from his ride north.
He pointed a gloved finger at the flat, oilcloth-wrapped stone resting on the corner of the table beneath Seyun’s right hand—Master Uren’s original Answering Spirit vein tablet from the Monastery of the Last Question.
“The tester project may be closed,” Venn said, pitching his voice in the reasonable, paternal register of an elder statesman, “but leaving the original Balance inheritance in the hands of an unaffiliated twenty-two-year-old fighter is an invitation to future disorder. If that stone remains loose in the valleys, another ambitious school will eventually repeat the old abbey’s coercion. Remand the original tablet to the Aperture Court’s central vault under joint seal. The council will record this entire matter as closed.”
Seyun stepped forward until his waist rested against the edge of the stone table, his left arm supported in its canvas sling and his right palm flat on the rough limestone tablet he had carried out of Uren’s underground chamber, yielded to Daro Kesh in Oran, yielded to Nara Soth in the pre-dawn seal court. Then he received back freely from both.
