From three paces away, Ivara Quill saw the moving shape of the trap collapse inward.
A land-mapper spent decades measuring static load, tension, and shear thresholds in stonework and bridge timbers, but when men fought in a ten-foot drainage cut, the same physical laws dictated who lived and who broke upon the stones.
To their front stood the double—balanced, zero-drag. Its boots settled onto the mud with the terrifying, unnatural balance of Burdenless Step. To their rear, Kroll’s third court guard was scrambling backward along the rail bed, wildly hauling the iron cocking lever of his crossbow to seat a fresh quarrel.
And from the crumbling stone roof ledges of the pump house roof, two more shapes dropped.
They didn’t land with the agile, cushioned recovery of living men. They struck the ballast stones with a flat, bone-jarring impact that sent spray from the drainage puddle five feet into the air. They didn’t roll to fade driving force. Their knees locked, their thick work-boots absorbing the fourteen-foot drop through sheer thickness of dead tissue.
They were town guard copies. The assigned dead from the old Drainage Works, requisitioned twelve years ago by Chancellor Morn’s office orders to clear choked channels under lethal sulfur heat wave.
