Hannah uncapped a marker. The hall was very quiet.
"One," Antoniou said. "Each round is four minutes. It ends at my call, and my call is not a suggestion.
"Two. These are technical rounds. They are scored — by me — on control, position and clean technique. Ippon ends a round, as always. A submission ends a round, as always, and a tap is a tap: hand, foot, voice, I do not care if it is whispered, the hold comes off before the sound has finished. There will be no argument about whether somebody truly tapped. I will be watching for it so that nobody has to be brave about it.
"Three. There will be no contests of strength. No lifting a man bodily merely because you can. No driving through a position with weight alone. If I see a technique abandoned in favour of mass, I will stop the round and the point goes the other way. We are an academy of judo and jiu-jitsu, not a quarry."
Marsh made a sound, and Antoniou looked at him.
"Four. The order." He turned to Tomas. "You offered. Do you have a preference?"
Tomas considered. It was characteristic of him — the room was learning this — that he treated the question as a real one rather than a courtesy. "Mr. Sato first," he said. "Then Mr. Marsh. Then Mr. Duarte." He said it without drama, as a man reads a running order. "If Mr. Duarte is the champion, he should have the last word."
"Cheek," Duarte said, but quietly, and with something in it that wasn't entirely displeasure.
"The order is agreed," Antoniou said. "Five. I referee. Nobody else speaks to the mat during a round — not the other seniors, not the applicants, not Hannah, who will be tempted." Hannah, writing, inclined her head in acknowledgement of the temptation. "Six. These rounds are part of Mr. Reiner's assessment. They are not a punishment, a hazing, or a show. Anyone who treats them as a show will discover that I have a long memory and a short list of people I trust to teach in this hall."
He signed the sheet with a flourish that belonged to another century, and Hannah taped it to the wall beside the photographs, where it looked very small and very official.
In the small silence that followed, the room divided audibly into its opinions. Osei whispered to Diana that he had come to be measured for a scholarship and appeared instead to have bought a ticket to something. One of the two friends who had come together for courage said, "He can't mean it," and the other said, "He's already done the hard part," and they looked at each other, startled, because neither of them was sure which part that was. The three black belts conferred without appearing to, in the manner of men at a funeral discussing the weather.
"He put Sato first on purpose," Marsh said under his breath. "Why would he do that?"
"To calibrate," Sato said. "Or to be disposed of efficiently." But he said it slowly, and Duarte glanced at him.
"You're volunteering opinions, Kenji. It's unlike you."
"I am noting that a man who is bluffing does not usually design the order of his own exposure," Sato said. "He takes the weakest first, to build a story. There is no weakest here, and he knows it, and he has put the champion last, where the champion belongs. Either he is a fool of a very unusual completeness—" he folded his arms again, "-or the morning is not what we filed it as."
"Nobody files mornings," Duarte said. "We survive them."
"Mr. Sato," Antoniou said. "Mr. Marsh. Mr. Duarte. I require your agreement. Not your enthusiasm. Your agreement."
Sato bowed at once. "It will be instructive," he said, in the tone of a man opening a book he expects to dislike and intends to finish. Marsh rolled his shoulders, and the grin he produced had an edge of grievance — the conditions had been written, everyone in the room understood, with his particular habits in mind, and the naming of strength as a disqualification felt to him like a rule invented mid-game. "Agreed," he said. "Though I'd like it noted that some of us are being asked to fight with one hand—"
"It is noted," Antoniou said, "and overruled. Mr. Duarte."