On the second breath, Seyun stepped squarely into the warm, damp patch of dark rock that Ilyra’s kneeling shin had just vacated beneath the western overhang of the drum. The air inside that two-foot pocket smelled of scorched rawhide, hot marsh iron, and ozone. Directly above his head, the yard-wide bronze housing of the lower returning hub roared like a breached blast fire. Its eastern returning plane was held thirty degrees high by Daro Kesh’s short sword and its three ground sockets jammed dead across the shelf.
The recoil of the released lower western vane had just jerked the rear under-lip of the drum four inches higher. Because of that, the inner ring of Heaven’s Measure—the nested bronze and silver governor wheel that no outsider had touched in forty years—hung bare at the height of Seyun’s breastbone.
Seyun didn’t throw away his plain ash staff to strike with bare hands, nor did he rely on the wooden shaft alone against three-inch bell bronze. In his braced right hand he gripped the forward third of the seasoned ash staff so the iron-shod metal ring projected fourteen inches ahead of his knuckles. Pinched tightly against the side of that iron metal ring by the thumb and forefinger of his left hand were the three four-inch copper test needles Elder Hesh had returned to him at Ash Reed’s outer gate.
