A bronze javelin skipped across the red stone flags, throwing off sparks before embedding itself three inches into the spruce hull of the Iron Sturgeon.
“Move!” Ren shouted.
He caught Mira by her left elbow. He pulled her off the landing stage as a volley of iron crossbow quarrels whistled through the shimmering seam where the air folded between epochs. Where the quarrel tips crossed the time fault line, the iron rusted forty years in a split second. It crumbled into clouds of red powder before striking the stone.
“I can walk, Ren,” Mira said, her boots finding traction on the slick granite cobbles. Her charcoal shawl was pulled over her hair, shielding her face from the biting wind that blew in two directions at once. Her right arm hung beneath the wool, the smoky quartz pulsing with a low soft glow that made alley shadows dance. “Watch the archway. It’s shivering.”
They ducked beneath the arch of the Old Salt Gate. Ahead, the city was tearing itself to pieces.
Low-Khorat was a maze of wet cellars, animal rendering vats, and rotting timber apartments where indentured scribes and debt-slaves lived packed together. Today, that heavy-duty squalor was wildly entwined with the royal luxury of the Sun-Crown Hegemony.
