The gold-silver metal shard cut through the air with a high, keening whistle, dropping toward Ren Prime’s neck-vein like a falling guillotine of frozen glass.
There were no summons left to interpose themselves. Brother Ren knelt in the dust, crushed beneath the weight of eighty years of vicarious guilt. Lord Ren lay pinned beneath the shattered leftovers of his broadsword. Unit Ren’s steam valves hissed feebly as dark high-pressure fluid pooled beneath his bronze chassis. And the Coward still huddled on his high top stone ledge sixty feet above. He grabbed his ears in blind terror.
Ren Prime didn’t step backward.
His boots were rooted into the grey ash. With both hands clamped around the four-inch mammoth ivory awl, he drove the silver tip upward in an angled, defensive block. He didn’t aim for the blade’s razor-sharp cutting edge. He aimed for the tiny notch near the handle where the mirror glass had been welded to its gold-silver metal tang. The single crushing weight point that every keeper learned to identify before purchasing contraband scrap in the under-city alleys of Low-Khorat.
CLANG.
The impact jarred every bone in Ren’s spine. The ivory grooved under the pressure, the silver metal ring biting deep into the gold-silver metal weld. It locked the two weapons together in a shower of pale, freezing sparks that lit up their matching faces.
