The bronze joining ring at the center of Reth Mal’s ritual weapon was a marvel of Aperture Court artifice. A three-inch collar of rune-cast mountain bronze brazed around the iron wooden handle, housing the delicate silver-liquid silver coupling where the floor cable’s raw pressure was stepped up and fed into the twin prongs. An opponent fought the blazing prongs at the tip of the weapon. So long as that held, the joining ring remained safely out of reach behind a wall of amplified Jade force.
Once Hall Mistress Soran’s branching step tricked Reth into over-extending past her hip and pinned the front half of his shaft at waist height, however, that bronze collar sat fully bare in the three-foot space between Soran’s front hand and Daro Kesh’s lead boot.
“No—back-draw the cable!” Reth gasped, his fingers scrambling wildly for the release latch on his handle. He saw the river-ward schoolmaster step into his blind spot.
He was half a heartbeat too late.
Daro Kesh was no longer swinging a three-foot sword that needed room to wind up. Because of that, his bare, hemp-wrapped iron handle moved with the compact, piston-like speed of a blacksmith’s punch. And wrapped around the four-inch iron crossguard over his knuckles was the full, packed four-inch volume of his newly proved Early Jade depth.
