Up on the solid trailhead, Daro Kesh didn’t waste breath asking whether four sacks of barley were worth dulled steel.
As the thirty-foot pale blade dropped out of its hover with a high, tearing whistle aimed straight at the fractured cleft, Daro drove his boots off the trailhead and leaped six feet up onto a projecting granite boulder that overhung the inner wall of the switchback. In his right hand, the plain, broad short sword forged from Ash Reed’s three salvaged fire ribs darkened with the full, unthrottled weight of his Early Jade focus.
He didn’t meet the pale blade with a single rigid block—that was how Reth Mal had split his old Bronze longsword at the Hollow Summit. Instead, as the white edge snapped down through the limestone dust, Daro swung the short blade across two same-time, overlapping routes. A high slanted that caught the leading point of the Measure’s stroke. Then he turned its main downward vector outward toward the open gorge. A compact lower plane that absorbed the backup shear before it could hammer the groaning limestone tooth beneath the shelf.
CLANG-SSSSSH!
A sheet of blue-white sparks hissed along the fire-hardened steel as Daro’s boots skidded three inches across the granite boulder and held. The terrible downward weight of the pale blade split thirty feet above their heads—half of its force whistling harmlessly out over the empty gulf. Meanwhile, the leftover blast wave crashed into the cliff face above the shelf. Then it sent a fresh avalanche…
