A wrought-iron clerk hall fire bowl filled with forty pounds of glowing white birch charcoal and bedded in three inches of fine sifted wood-ash was never meant to be moved once lit. It sat on three curved iron legs forged to keep its heat off the cedar wainscot, its balance point resting low and wide over the flat stone slabs.
But to a twenty-two-year-old laborer who had spent eleven winters in the Ash Reed boiler pit leveraging three-hundred-pound melted rock waste-carts out of sunken iron tracks with a heel and a shoulder-brace, forty pounds of hot iron on three legs was simply a balance weight waiting for a pivot point.
As the third Court operative’s trench blade hissed through the empty air an inch above Seyun’s ducked crown, Seyun’s Returning Step coiled the moving driving force of his low slide down through his right hip and snapped his hooked boot upward and back across the threshold of the open bookcase door.
CLANG- RATTLE- WHOOSH!
The heavy iron fire bowl didn’t merely tip. Lifted by the nearside leg and wrenched sideways on its leftover two feet, the wide brass pan somersaulted across the flat stone slabs directly into the shins of the third and fourth Court operatives, spilling forty pounds of blazing bright red birch coals and ten quarts of powdery, white-hot white wood-ash into an exploding curtain between the table and the hidden bookcase doorway.
