Seyun leaped across the fractured neck of stone onto the inner edge of the tilted shelf. That kept his weight low over his knees so his boots added as little downward shear as possible to the groaning limestone tooth.
The air inside the cleft was choked with crushed lime and the sharp, sour smell of the mule’s panic sweat. Overhead, pebbles and splinters of dark shale rattled continuously off Ilyra’s Early Jade spear wake and Bel Sar’s raised Bronze staff like hail on a tin roof. Every two seconds, the twenty-foot slab beneath their soles gave a tiny, sickening settling shudder. Half a finger-width closer to the two-hundred-foot drop into the gorge.
To Seyun’s trained martial eye, the shape of the problem was self-evident. A jammed wooden pack frame and four heavy burlap sacks were dead weight. A fifty-year-old villager and a Bronze staff keeper were living human beings. And the pale blade whistling thirty feet above the cliff was about to drop with enough force to split the rock beneath all of them.
Seyun slid his short iron belt knife out of its sheath with his right hand while bracing Nara’s ash staff in his left. He stepped to Mer’s shoulder and barked the obvious, efficient command:
