The grey ash of the burning promise didn’t drift to the white marble floor.
It rose against the draft of the hall, defying the hot updrafts pouring from the floor-grates, swirling in a tight, counter-clockwise vortex that gathered around Ren Vale’s left breast.
The eight-sided frame of the Speculum of Forfeited Paths burned through his lambskin apron like a branding iron. The heat was not heat. It was a deep, choking absence of heat. The total zero of the interstellar void, so cold that the wool of his coat stiffened with sudden rime frost.
“Take his head!” Chancellor Orin screamed, retreating behind the linked shields of four brass iron-puppets. “Don’t let him invoke the mirror! Sola, impale him!”
Arch-Inquisitor Lyra Sola thrust her right hand forward. The ring of seven long silver needles hovering above her palm flared with blinding, sun-charged radiance. With a sharp flick of her fingers, the needles shot through the air in parallel trajectories. That left glowing amber ionization trails that scorched the marble flags.
They were aimed directly at Ren’s throat, heart, and temples.
They never reached him.
Three feet in front of Ren’s chest, the air warped. Space didn’t merely resist the projectiles. It curved into an impossible, nearby gravity well. The seven silver needles, traveling at high-speed, suddenly banked ninety degrees upward, screeching as their metal mass was deflected by an unseen sky-high plane. They slammed harmlessly into the vaulted quartz ceiling sixty feet above, shattering two massive prisms into showers of sparkling…
