Eighteen inches in front of Daro Kesh’s chest, the twin outer jaws of Jade Retrieval Commander Keth Or’s fifth strike clamped down on empty air.
To the left, the western squeezing jaw slammed into the load-bearing granite pillar with an ear-splitting roar that flaked a twenty-pound slab of dressed stone off the column’s corner.
To the right, the eastern squeezing jaw grazed the outer granite lip of the four-foot dressing-screen. It sent a shower of stone sparks flying harmlessly past the corner where Seyun and Mina sheltered beside the western rim of the chalk circle.
And right down the middle between those two spent walls of Early Jade pressure—inside the nine-inch hollow channel running along the iron-wood shaft of the seven-foot glaive itself—came Daro Kesh and his thirty-inch broken Bronze sword.
A forty-inch blade would have caught its point on the curved steel collar of the glaive and been wrenched sideways.
Daro’s square-snapped thirty-inch blade cleared the inside of the steel collar with half an inch to spare.
Sliding his scarred left palm halfway up the flat spine of his broken sword in the classic half-sword fuller grip that his senior student Kes had practiced with him in the Oran schoolyard, Daro Kesh didn’t slash with the edge.
