Ten paces down the fractured granite row of stone pillars, Commander Keth Or skidded to a halt across the crushed flat stone slabs, his left hand clamping tightly over the bleeding gash on his right wrist. Meanwhile, his boots ploughed two deep furrows through the mortar dust. The impact of Hall Mistress Soran’s white-ash spear against his breastplate—caught. Meanwhile, his spatial funnel was collapsing from Daro Kesh’s wrist cut. Had dented the grey mountain steel over his chest bone and forced a mouthful of dark blood onto his chin.
Before Keth Or’s twenty-four black-armored troopers on the lower steps could surge up into the gallery to shield their wounded commander, the timber roof edges directly above the fifth granite pillar burst outward in a shower of frost-rimed slate shingles.
Dropping fourteen feet from the upper drying-loft narrow high walkway now that the last valley refugee was safely behind the archive terrace doors, Ilyra landed on the left side of the row of stone pillars with her sixty-eight-inch black marsh-iron spear driving downward in a wide, sweeping Branching Wake arc that smashed the ash bucklers of the two lead Court troopers on the steps and drove the vanguard wedge back down the stair!
