CRASH!
The heavy oak bar across the clerk hall’s hall door finally split down the grain as Osen Tal’s three hall guards drove their timber bench through the upper panel. Splinters of seasoned oak flew across the flat stone slabs as the door banged wide against the scroll racks.
Inside the study, the ambush was already over. The lead Court operative hung pinned by his leather wrist guard against the cedar paneling where Ilyra’s spear had nailed him. The second operative lay unconscious across the shattered rosewood table with his collarbone broken by the butt of her ash shaft. And on the dark water tank landing behind the wedged bookcase, the third and fourth operatives were retreating up the iron ladder rungs rather than force their heads one by one through a fourteen-inch granite gap into a Bronze spearwoman’s reach.
The three White Heron hall guards stumbled over the threshold with their iron-headed pikes leveled. Then, they froze in the doorway. Staring through the stinging fog of white birch ash at the overturned fire bowl, the collapsed bookcase framing the illegal water tank shaft, the two black-cloaked Aperture Court killers lying on the floor of their steward’s private study, and Senior Steward Osen Tal’s empty wool cushion.
