Before the falling chunk of shale could strike Archivist Vel’s bowed neck, Daro Kesh drew his heavy Bronze sword six inches from its sword sheath and angled the broad flat of the steel above the scholar’s shoulder. The stone cracked against the dark metal and skittered harmlessly off into the gorge mist. Daro didn’t waste breath lecturing Seyun further. Seyun admitted what his injured body could and couldn’t do. Then, the three fighters rearranged their work on the narrow cliff face with the quiet, unglamorous smooth speed of quarry workers shifting a cracked top door beam.
Ilyra climbed back across the four-foot overhang with her spear strapped diagonally across her spine. She unwound the six-yard braided linen sash that bound her White Heron outer tunic. Her right shoulder was stiff and hot beneath its bloodied dressing. So she looped the doubled cloth around her sound left hip and knotted the free end securely around Archivist Vel’s ribs above the leather satchel straps. That left twenty inches of taut slack between their bodies.
“Listen to me, Master Vel,” Ilyra said. She took the old clerk’s stiffened right wrist between her gloved fingers and placing his palm flat against the back of her leather belt. “Nobody is going to lift you across the air. You don’t need to look at the cliff or the creek. You have spent forty years reading line-items one row at a time with a bone pointer. We’re going to read this wall the exact same way. When…
