“Back to the arch!” Jon Hale shouted, throwing his weight against the younger Ash Host guard’s mail-clad chest and shoving the stunned soldier three paces backward toward the brick entrance shaft just as the sky inside the Re-Claim Chamber came down.
Marshal Ors had half-risen from his knees beside the central pedestal, his right gauntlet closing around the iron haft of his dropped siege mace, when the two-ton cast-iron ceiling girder tore free of its eastern granite corbel.
The twenty-foot beam did not fall flat; its western end remained hung up on a twisted wrought-iron tie-rod thirty feet overhead, causing the sheared eastern end to swing downward like a titanic blacksmith’s trip-hammer straight through the rising column of white furnace steam.
Ors looked up into the red glare half a heartbeat before the iron reached him. He tried to roll sideways toward the drainage channel, his hobnailed boots scrabbling wildly for purchase on the slick lime-scale of the flagstones, but the heavy steel plates of his cuirass and his waterlogged wolf-skin mantle dragged him down.
With an earth-shaking CRASH that split the six-inch granite paving slabs into jagged cobbles and sent a geyser of boiling runoff splashing against the vaulted walls, the lower flange of the red-hot cast-iron girder slammed down across the base of the bronze viewing pedestal and caught Marshal Ors squarely across the small of his back.
