The water of the river flume was turning clearer, washing the grey stone slurry down the drainage grates, but the smell of roasted marrow and scorched iron lingered in the air like an indelible stain.
Jon Hale remained on his knees beside the fallen knight, watching the shallow, rapid rise and fall of Cael’s chest. Every breath drew a wheezing whistle from the hero’s throat, his collar-bone laboring against the blackened hollow where the scorched, cracked gold seal rested against bone and raw tissue. The skin around the edges of the heavy coin was blistered and weeping, the cooked tissue shrinking as the cold mountain river water lapped against his flanks.
Then Cael’s gaze shifted.
Through the curtain of sweat and dried blood clinging to his lashes, the hero’s left eye fixed upon something lying four paces away on the gravel bank of the flume.
It was his sword.
The broadsword—forged from imperial crucible steel, three feet of heavy, double-edged blade notched by dozens of cavalry encounters—lay half-submerged in the cold mountain runoff. It was the weapon that had accompanied him through forty campaigns, the steel that had severed rebel banners and broken shield walls from the western marshes to the northern peaks. Now it rested among ordinary river silt, catching the dim, reddish glow of the cooling mercury vents, gleaming with a dull, malevolent luster against the dark pebbles. The wire-wrapped grip was intact, dry and waiting, its heavy iron pommel resting against a fragment of shattered granite.
