On the gravel crown of the road, steel rang against steel for the fourth time in ten heartbeats. The shock of the crash drove Ilyra’s rear boot back until her heel brushed the iron-shod tip of the third wagon’s tongue. Above her bowed ashwood spear shaft, the masked swordsman’s forty-inch blade pressed downward with the cold, dead weight of a drop-gate grate. That forced her wounded right shoulder to bear a load meant for two whole arms.
Three feet behind her heel, crouched low beside the front wheel, Seyun kept his eyes fixed on the narrow slit of the killer’s iron half-mask.
He had seen the habit twice now, and on the fifth raising of the straight-backed sword he saw it a third time. A tenth of a second before the swordsman committed his hip and shoulder to a cut, his gray eyes flicked upward past Ilyra’s white-tasseled spearhead to lock onto the bright, shimmering column of heat rising from the three copper needles on the fire-spirit crate.
In the archive rooms of Ash Reed Hall, Seyun had copied enough treatises on realm shifts to understand the clockwork necessity behind that glance. A Flame-rank fighter fought by feel and rapid shift. That let internal breath flare and bend with every clash of wrists. A newly consolidated Early Bronze fighter, by contrast, achieved his crushing load-bearing force by locking his mind, breath, and spine onto a single, unbending sharp-angled line between himself and a fixed point in space.
A Bronze fighter stood on a clear flat stone slab courtyard in daylight. Then, he could anchor that sharp-angled line on an opponent’s chest bone or throat and drive straight through every block. Here in the narrow gap between the wagons, however, the east wind was whipping thick, greasy curtains of black stone-fire-oil smoke across the roadbed in unpredictable gusts, obscuring Ilyra’s boots, hips, and shoulders every other second.
Because the swordsman couldn’t hold a nonstop visual line on Ilyra’s body through the churning black soot, he had chosen a higher, brighter mark that never moved: the blazing bright white heat-plume venting straight up from the third wagon’s bronze-inlaid crate.
That destination point remained stationary and visible above the smoke. So long as that held, the Bronze focus trough riding ahead of the blade could cleave straight through swirling oil-soot, wind, and Late Flame parries alike. The swordsman was not actually out-reading Ilyra’s footwork in the dark fire-oil cloud. He was sighting on the glowing heat plume of the third wagon like a river steersman sighting on a harbor lighthouse, and simply driving his blade straight through whatever stood between his handle and the light.
By planting herself directly in front of the stationary wagon tongue to protect the vents, Ilyra had inadvertently made herself part of the lighthouse’s doorway. Every time she braced her boots to hold the center of the road, she gave the killer’s Bronze certainty the exact rigid pushback it needed to crush her downward.
If Seyun couldn’t stop the sword, he could move the lighthouse.
He calculated the slope of the highway and the position of the wheels in a single glance. Ten minutes ago, when Pel and Tomas had fitted the spare hickory axle to the third wagon, they had jacked the carriage up on the slight southward camber of the gravel road, less than four feet from the lip of the flooded southern reed ditch. The only thing keeping the heavy four-wheeled carriage from rolling backward down that cambered shoulder into the ditch was the three-sided granite chock-stone Pel had wedged behind the rear left wheel after Seyun uncoupled the burning manifest cart.
Down in the southern ditch itself, four inches of slow-moving marsh water lay over a firm bed of matted sedge roots and compacted gray silt. It was deep enough to drop the wagon’s bed three feet below the road crown, yet firm enough that the broad iron tires wouldn’t capsize the crate.
Seyun didn’t shout his plan across the road where the masked swordsman could hear and adjust his stride. Instead. Meanwhile, the killer’s blade was still grinding against Ilyra’s high cross-guard in a shower of sparks, Seyun slid backward on his heels beneath the front axle-tree of the third wagon and looked down into the southern ditch.
Six feet away behind the stacked breastwork of salvaged barley sacks, Pel and young Tomas were crouching in the muddy water with their hickory pry-bars in hand. He watched the duel above them with white, strained faces. Behind them, the two wounded wagonwrights were pressing wet rags over their faces against the smoke.
Seyun caught Pel’s eye under the wagon bed and pointed two blistered fingers sharply downward. First at the three-sided granite chock-stone wedged behind the rear left wheel, then down the sloped mud embankment into the reed ditch itself. It was followed by a pulling motion of his fist toward the rear spokes.
Pel had driven four-horse freight wagons over mountain passes for thirty years. He didn’t need a diagram drawn on parchment to understand what happened when you pulled a chock-stone on a cambered roadbed with a three-foot ditch beside the wheels. His gray eyebrows shot up once, then settled into a grim, comprehending nod. He nudged young Tomas in the ribs and crept low along the ditch margin toward the rear axle of the third wagon. That kept the bulk of the carriage between himself and the northern outriders’ crossbows.
Up at the front of the wagon, the masked swordsman wrenched his blade free of Ilyra’s spear socket. Then it stepped in half a pace, raising his steel for a heavy overhead cleaving stroke meant to split both her ashwood shaft and the wagon tongue behind her. Once again, for a tenth of a second above the iron mask, his gray eyes flicked upward to lock onto the whistling copper vents.
“Ilyra!” Seyun called out, pitching his voice low and sharp at the exact level of her hip so it carried under the roar of the fire. “When the tongue drops—step left, not back!”
She didn’t waste breath asking why, nor did she glance over her shoulder. Even with dark blood soaking her right sleeve from shoulder to elbow, her trust in his reading of the ground was instant. Her left boot shifted two inches outward in the wet gravel, preparing to clear the track of the front wheels the moment the timber moved.
At the rear left wheel, Pel braced the iron-shod tip of his five-foot hickory pry-bar against the point of the granite chock-stone and struck the handle sideways with the heel of his boot. The stone popped free of the muddy rut with a wet sucking sound.
In the same instant, Pel and young Tomas grabbed the muddy oak spokes of the rear left wheel with both hands and hauled backward toward the southern ditch. Meanwhile, Seyun braced his back against the front blade collar beam and wrenched the resting wagon tongue forty degrees toward the north.
With the coupling chain already cut from the burning manifest cart ahead, nothing held the heavy central carriage to the crown of the road.
Crushed gravel ground beneath the iron tires. Slowly for the first foot, then gathering weight as the rear axle crossed the cambered lip of the highway, the third wagon lurched backward four feet and slid off the southern shoulder. He dropped its rear wheels with a tremendous, muddy splash down the sloped embankment into the flooded reed ditch.
The sudden three-foot drop of the rear axle tilted the entire carriage backward at a twenty-degree angle, yanking the front wagon tongue—and the three whistling copper needles in the forward crate—six feet backward and three feet lower than the crown of the road in the span of a single breath.
Up in the smoke, the masked swordsman’s overhead cleaving stroke was already dropping along the rigid sharp-angled line where the wagon’s front panel had stood half a second earlier.
Ilyra pivoted cleanly to her left on the ball of her foot as Seyun had called, letting her spear tip guide the falling Bronze blade three inches outward instead of meeting its dead weight head-on. The forty-inch war sword snapped downward through empty smoke and struck the gravel roadbed where the wagon tongue had rested, splitting a fist-sized river cobble in half and burying its point two inches deep in the mud.
Across the northern ditch bank, two of the axe-armed outriders shouted in alarm. They saw the central carriage drop three feet lower behind the embankment, spoiling their crossbow height and forcing them to scramble sideways through the willow roots for a clear shot.
For the first time since the masked leader had stepped out of the willow scrub, his shoulders jerked forward off-balance as the solid wooden target he had sighted on vanished into the ditch.