The revised approach began badly in its very first breath outside the granite overhang. Lunging out from the southern lip of the dark rock recess with her boots driving hard into the frost-crusted shale, Ilyra jammed the eighteen-inch leftover piece of her marsh-iron spearhead upward into the lower sweep of the nearest pale blade. Sparks of cold white pressure sprayed across her leather gauntlets as her Early Jade pried open a narrow, three-foot lane along the western rock trough. At the exact same instant, Daro Kesh braced his good left leg against the eastern corner wall and caught the lower returning plane across the flat of his chipped fire-rib short sword. He held the eastern groove off the launch path.
Seyun burst five paces upslope into the narrow hall Ilyra’s short spearhead had just wedged apart. That kept his plain ash staff low and his central spirit vein trunk coiled for the thirty-pace dash to the lower hub. Under his boots, the fractured dark rock sloped sharply upward toward the yard-wide bronze drum spinning in its stone basin twenty-five paces ahead. For half a heartbeat, as the cold mountain wind tore at his wool coat and his stitched left calf took the first push off the gravel, it looked as though their stripped-down, three-part entry had caught the outer ring between beats.
