On the fourth breath, Nara Soth released the lock behind her collarbone. Ilyra drove the eighteen-inch stub forward six inches with both hips.
There was no sound at the level of the shelf. Because the strike carried all the air within three paces of the doorway straight up the eastern chute with it.
A thin, colorless plane of tightly packed sound shear—no wider than the flat of Ilyra’s two-foot spearhead and sharpened by the three-hundred-year notch of the Listening Crown—shot upward from the iron tip at thirty zhang per heartbeat. It passed the outer lip of the dark rock ledge. Then, the empty pocket wake behind it snapped shut with a dry, ear-splitting THWACK that cracked the frost off the entire northern cliff face and rattled the heavy iron blade in Daro Kesh’s sword sheath.
Thirty zhang overhead, the eighth rib of the eight-sided lattice was within half an inch of sliding back into its eastern housing to seal the outer sky-slit rim.
It never reached the latch.
The colorless shear-plane struck the warbled three-yard section of the outer cultivated rim dead along the open seam where the seventh fin had been pried out of line.
For a single, frozen instant, the ancient bronze-white shape of Heaven’s Measure strained to distribute the impact around its full outer rim. Just then, it had done for hundreds of years whenever a solitary fighter struck the sky from below. Had Nara fired the Listening Crown pulse from her palm alone, the wide, circular…
