Five paces of frost-cracked black shale separated the southern escape junction from the eight-sided granite basin of Approval Socket #3. Bel Sar covered them in three low, driving strides that owed nothing to courtly grace and everything to the river timber yards where the Ash Reed school had been born. Bel had founded his modest school beside the reed marshes. Then, his students had not been wealthy sect heirs seeking immortality. They had been ferrymen, quarry wagon drivers, and timber rafters who needed to know how to keep their footing on wet logs and how to use a six-foot pole to turn a runaway barge without getting their ribs crushed.
Now, at Middle Bronze, with the upper two feet of his favorite ash pole lying in splinters across the ridge from saving Keth Or in the third watch, Bel carried the four-foot lower leftover piece like a heavy river-pike. The bottom eight inches of that shaft were shod in a thick, eight-sided sleeve of forge-welded marsh iron that Bel himself had riveted onto the wood three winters ago so the butt wouldn’t fray against stone mooring posts.
Bel charged up the five paces of slope. Then, the overloaded collar of Approval Socket #3 sensed his approaching Middle Bronze heat and tried to whip a backup defensive arc out of the southern channel trench to sweep his shins. Two watches ago, that backup arc would have carried the full driving force of the main southern guide-rod and sliced through a Bronze…
