Limping across the frost-whitened dark rock floor with the wooden splint bound tight along his torn right thigh, Daro Kesh stopped beside the largest fallen fragment of the main blade ring. A five-foot slab of dark, pitted metal lying half-buried in the gravel five paces south of the split bronze drum. Twenty minutes earlier, touching that slab without a full Black-Roof School block-angle would have snapped a man’s arm off at the elbow. Then he sent a forty-breath test counter-wave roaring down the trenches.
Daro stood over the slab for a moment, his soot-blackened face serious in the grey light of breaking dawn and his raw, split-bandaged hands wrapped around the grip of his thirty-inch fire-rib short sword. Along the belly of his sword, the three deep notches chewed into the iron by the eastern plane’s third-watch and fourth-watch currents showed bright grey against the blackened flat.
Raising the chipped short sword six inches above his shoulder, Daro brought the flat of the blade down in a crisp, ordinary test-tap against the center of the fallen fragment. Clank.
There was no white flash of condensing current, no ozone hiss, no upward rebound trying to classify his wrist angle. No sympathetic hum from the split bronze drum.
