With three of his six men down in the mud and the drainage trench within forty breaths, the masked leader abandoned any try to take the courtyard intact. He stepped back to the base of the timber porch steps. He drew a deep, rasping breath in that made the dark-orange Late Flame along his heavy cleaver-blade swell to the width of a man’s palm. Meanwhile, the crossbowman at the wall dropped his empty bow. Then he drew a short iron crow-bill.
The dead grave robber’s oiled calfskin satchel—with the blank wax cakes and the red-lead map tucked back inside it—lay half-wedged beneath the bottom step of the shrine porch where Ilyra had kicked it at the start of the rush.
“Take the bag and fire the roof!” the masked leader snarled, his voice muffled behind boiled leather as he launched himself forward in a two-handed overhead stroke aimed straight down the center line at Ilyra’s head.
He was forty pounds heavier than Ilyra, his feet were planted on the higher dry step of the porch. His Late Flame was fresh whereas hers had been drained by twenty minutes of fighting the third-dynasty stele. Ilyra raised her ash shaft horizontally in the traditional White Heron Barred Gate block to meet his downward crash. Then, the impact sliced through the rotten wooden porch railing beside them and drove her boots skidding four inches backward across the wet flat stone slabs.
From six paces away behind the monument, Seyun saw her left elbow tremble wildly. The knife gash across her shoulder muscle was parting under the two-handed load. If she held the center line for one more downward blow—as every White Heron manual commanded a spear-bearer to do when defending a threshold—the torn muscle in her left shoulder would tear fully through, her shaft would dip. The leader’s cleaver would split her collarbone.
At the same instant, the fourth attacker with the iron crow-bill dove low beneath the locked weapons. It reached with his left hand to snatch the calfskin satchel out from under the porch step.
“Yield the center line toward the stele, Ilyra!” Seyun shouted, already moving out from behind the granite slab with his longest four-inch copper needle drawn between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “Drop your left elbow and let him hit the stone!”
Every instinct of ten years in White Heron Hall’s inner yard screamed at Ilyra that yielding the center line under a heavy blade was suicide. Also, the voice telling her to drop her guard belonged to an expelled Ash Reed student whose wrists she had bound with her own silk tassel half an hour ago.
Yet in the fraction of a heartbeat before the leader’s second Late Flame stroke fell, Ilyra remembered the empty water flask at Seyun’s hip and the exact second-beat call that had dropped the two flankers into the trench. Against every rule of her training, she listened to him.
Instead of pushing upward into the dropping cleaver, Ilyra released her wounded left hand from the shaft entirely, dropped her right elbow to her hip, and pivoted forty-five degrees around the corner of Warden Maro’s stele.
Expecting rigid pushback, the masked leader over-committed his full Late Flame weight into empty air. His heavy glowing cleaver missed Ilyra’s shoulder by an inch and crashed squarely into the upper face of the third-dynasty funerary stele.
The pre-charter granite didn’t split. Instead, just as it had done when Ilyra’s spear pierced it at dawn, the iron-bearing shale drank the violent martial strike. Then it sent a blinding bronze-white blast wave roaring back up the leader’s cleaver handle, numbing both of his arms to the elbows and welding his blade edge into the stone notch.
At the same time, Seyun slid on his knees under the sagging porch overhang where the fourth thief’s hand was closing on the strap of the calfskin satchel. Without Flame to match the man’s leather wrist guard, Seyun drove the mirror-smooth point of his four-inch copper needle half an inch deep into the unprotected crease of the thief’s wrist, directly between the palmaris tendons.
The thief’s fingers sprang open in reflex nerve burst. Seyun snatched the calfskin satchel clear with his left hand, drew his copper needle smoothly out of the man’s wrist on the backward roll so he wouldn’t lose a single tool in the mud. Then he came up behind the stone porch pillar with both the bag and all three needles intact.
Rolling out from beneath the sagging porch overhang with the oiled calfskin satchel tucked under his left arm and his bloodied four-inch copper needle pinched cleanly between his right fingers, Seyun wiped the needle point on the wet hem of his coat before sliding it back into its waxed linen groove at his belt. He had driven the square-hammered shaft to the exact three-tenths-of-an-inch file mark needed to stun the median nerve between the wrist tendons without severing the artery. A clean apothecary’s prick that left the fourth attacker clutching a useless, tingling hand in the weeds rather than bleeding to death on the shrine steps.
Out by the central stele, the bronze-white blast wave from the pre-charter ward was still humming through the granite where the masked leader’s heavy cleaver stood wedged an inch deep in the stone. The leader’s gauntleted hands were shaking from the rebound of his own Late Flame strike. His eyes were wide behind the eye-slits of his boiled-leather mask. He realized that the unbadged Coal youth had deliberately baited him into striking the oath-stone.
Ilyra stood two paces to the side of the monument. Her left arm was pressed tightly against her ribs to staunch the fresh blood welling through her grey cloak. Meanwhile, her right hand brought the seven-foot spear point back on line with the leader’s chest. Even through her pain and tiredness, her gaze flicked once to Seyun’s face by the porch pillar.
In White Heron Hall’s sparring rings, yielding the center line to an opponent’s overhead stroke was punished with twenty strokes of the rattan rod. That was because it relied on the terrain or a partner to catch the blow you let past. By obeying Seyun’s shout and dropping her elbow, she had staked her life on the accuracy of a prisoner’s judgment. And the prisoner had saved both her shoulder and the evidence bag without spilling an ounce of wasted force.
“The satchel is whole!” Seyun called to her, backing one pace up the stone porch steps so the crossbowman by the outer wall couldn’t circle behind the pillar. “Don’t follow him into the open gate—he still has a fire-pot in the arch!”
The masked leader didn’t try to speak Warden Maro’s funerary release phrase. He didn’t know the dead warden’s name, nor would the stone have answered a man who had come to burn the shrine. Abandoning the expensive Late Flame cleaver where it stood buried in the granite, the leader threw himself backward behind the two wounded flankers limping toward the gateway.
The leader wrenched a spare broadsword from the belt of the man whose collarbone Ilyra had pierced. Then, the leather frog of the sword sheath caught on the gold-threaded inner clasp of the leader’s oilskin coat. It ripped a small, flat wooden tally loose from its silk cord inside his lapel. Neither the leader nor his retreating men noticed the thumb-sized piece of black lacquer drop into the churned clay beside the western gate-post.
Seyun saw it fall, and he saw the pale bone circle inlaid in its face before the mud splashed over its rim. Yet before anyone could look down at the puddle, the former crossbowman in the gateway arch pulled the wooden plug from a squat clay pot fire-pot packed with pitch and sulfur-fire-oil. He held a flint-striker poised over the oily wick.
If that sulfur-fire-oil pot broke inside the twenty-foot courtyard, the burning pitch would float across every puddle on the flat stone slabs. That turned the shrine into a roasting pan that neither Ilyra’s Late Flame nor Seyun’s Coal footwork could put out. The only roof timber heavy enough to smother the gateway arch in a single breath hung directly above the crossbowman’s head.
Seyun measured the sag of the waterlogged gatehouse top door beam with one swift glance. He saw how the morning’s frost had opened the fracture in the eastern granite ledge-stone bracket to the width of two fingers. One clean Late Flame spear-thrust into that stone bracket, paired with a same-time upward heave under the rotted western wood slot tongue, would drop the entire upper course of the arch before the flint-striker could spark. One clean strike to the eastern stone ledge-stone while he levered the western post would drop two tons of waterlogged cedar straight across the gateway.
He didn’t have time to explain the stonework to her. He only had time to call the count and trust that her spear would meet his shoulder on the third beat.