Mezos tried to move the fingers of his right hand and discovered, through an immediate and deeply educational burst of pain, that at least one bone remained broken, along with several ether channels the physicians had described as "badly strained" because apparently palace medicine preferred polite language to accuracy.
The Gate had thrown him into the column like a fucking fly.
He clenched his left hand against the white marble, directly over the long crack his body had left behind, while the support field around his injured shoulder tightened in warning.
There was no Gate anymore.
Only the damaged column, a faint distortion in the ward pattern, and several readings so poor that even Nuria's engineers had stopped pretending they constituted useful evidence. Severin had informed him that no one inside the boundary had ever observed a Gate for more than a few seconds, much less measured one before it vanished.
That information had placed Mezos in a foul mood.
