Seyun pushed himself up on one elbow in the eastern drainage ditch. Meanwhile, his braced left ribs throbbed in time with his pulse. He saw the blast of fractured granite top door beam stones and razor-edged roof slates hurtling down the slope toward the western trench. Ilyra was on her knees by the courtyard gate clamping her fingers around the spurting artery in the cooper’s forearm. Daro was still sliding down the collapsed upper terrace rubble with his bent patrol sword. And forty men, women, and children were bunched in the open mud thirty yards below the collapsing hall with nothing between their backs and the shrapnel.
Nara Soth stood at the rear of the escape line beside the elderly weaver she had helped through the gate. She had refused to leap onto the shrine roof as the solitary sky-challenger Heaven’s Measure wanted to classify. Wait: the pale blade itself had already spent its single dropping stroke cleaving the empty building and was dissolving back into cold mist above the cinders. What remained in the air was three dozen flying chunks of broken granite and slate driven by the collapse’s blast wave.
Nara didn’t hesitate. Planting her wooden walking staff with her right hand, she turned her shoulders toward the exploding timber hall. Then she opened her Crown.
