On the great fifth balcony three elders practiced a combined formation.
They were older and their coordination was precise. For them Lin Mu and Elyon staged a small, false alarm. Elyon's darkness slipped into the corridor and carved a line of shadow that described a distant pot breaking.
The servants rushed along the outer galleries in an illusion engineered by shadow, and the three elders moved to inspect. As they hurried through corridors that would have otherwise been empty, their steps matched a rhythm Lin Mu had anticipated.
Waiting in a gap between beams he stabbed straight, passing through all of them at once. One by one they fell, and by the time the servants returned there was only silence and the faint worry on their faces at the absence of sound from those rooms.
They worked up through the halls, floor by floor.
