The brown pack mule lunged across the tilted middle section of the shelf with Mer sprinting low at its right shoulder. Then, a backup pressure wave snapped downward from the pale blade locked against Daro’s short sword thirty feet above.
The invisible edge struck the fractured overhang directly above the center of the ledge and sliced loose a three-hundred-pound wedge of stratified limestone and dark shale.
Bel Sar, scrambling two paces behind with his Bronze reserve nearly spent and his heavy staff already pinned low by sliding gravel, couldn’t raise his pole in time to reach the upper flight path of the falling wedge. And ahead at the trailhead neck, Ilyra’s spear wake was fully committed to holding the outer wind-shear off the exit gap.
The falling slab of limestone dropped straight toward the moving slanted where the mule’s swaying barley sacks and Mer’s bent back were crossing the crack.
Seyun didn’t look up at the rock and calculate a fixed point of interception. That was because the mule beneath the rock was not moving in a straight line. Scared by a puff of dust spurting from a fissure near its left forefoot, the animal swerved suddenly two feet to the left—straight toward the outer lip of the shelf—before its iron shoe caught a dry ridge of stone and it lurched back inward toward Mer.
