The first pale blade had struck the hillside three days ago. Then, Daro Kesh’s borrowed iron sword had warped like wet tin on the first block. Now, as the heavier second blade hammered down onto his twenty-two-inch fire-rib steel, the shock drove his boots two inches into the compacted shale. Yet the broad grey metal sang with a clear, unbroken tone. Seasoned by decades of multi-aimed fire pressure and flattened along its spine at Kes’s insistence, the blade admitted Daro’s Early Jade side-shift without a single micro-fracture.
Instead of locking his shoulder against the upright crush, Daro let his Adaptable Depth pivot around the living reality behind him. The shelters were four paces to his right. The barren scree chute was six paces to his left. Tilting his wrist through the flattened guard line, he slid the roaring white weight obliquely across the flat of his short sword and dumped the main body of the stroke deep into the uninhabited shale bank.
Fifty tons of loose grey scree exploded into gravel dust as the main edge ploughed a smoking trench away from the timber roofs. Below the bank, Ilyra held her shortened marsh-iron spear braced across the under-road drain ditch, splitting the blast wave into harmless side eddies while Seyun’s Deeper Bronze Answering Edge absorbed the shaking along the timber top door beam so the stones wouldn’t shift onto the cooper’s family.
