The pale blade had carved a trough through the cliffside as clean and pitiless as a carpenter’s gouge through rotten pine.
Where a six-foot-wide drover’s track had hugged the limestone wall ten minutes ago, only a narrow, fractured neck of rock remained attached to the solid trailhead where Seyun, Ilyra. Daro skidded to a halt. Beyond that neck, a twenty-foot slab of dark shale and stratified limestone had broken away from the cliff seam and tilted outward at a fifteen-degree slant over a two-hundred-foot upright drop into the dry gorge.
The only thing keeping the entire twenty-foot shelf from sliding into the deep pit was a single jagged tooth of grey dolomitic limestone jutting up from the lower stratum near the outer lip. Even from forty paces away, Seyun could hear that limestone tooth groaning under the load—a low, gritty crunching sound as pebbles ground to powder in its socket.
Thirty feet above the tilted shelf, the detached pale blade hung like a sliver of frozen moonlight, its flat side humming as it lined up itself with the breath rising from the cleft below.
Inside the fractured cleft behind the shelf stood three men and a brown pack mule.
Nearest the outer overhang stood Bel Sar. The broad-shouldered Ash Reed staff keeper had planted his boots wide across the crack at the rear of the shelf and raised his heavy iron-shod staff overhead in both hands. It used his force-distributing Bronze focus to catch and deflect the fist-sized chunks of…
