The sword in Sergeant Vane’s hands never completed its downward strike.
From the dark shadow beside Kezra’s handcart, Paxa Sel moved with the brutal, economical smooth speed of a battlefield healer who had spent fifteen years managing violent drunks and frantic wounded in field surgery tents. She didn’t reach for a dagger. Instead, her hands seized the iron rim of a sixty-gallon wooden water butt that stood beside the stone support prop wall. A heavy oak cask filled with eighty pounds of cold wash-water and lime-settling gravel.
With a deep, deep-throated grunt from the core of her hips, Paxa tipped the cask on its chime and shoved it wildly down the three-pace slope of the alley.
The heavy wooden barrel crashed onto its side. It sent a brown wave of gravel-choked water and loose cobblestones roaring down the narrow channel directly into the shins of the five charging soldiers. The second and third men in line slipped instantly on the wet, greasy flat stone slabs, their iron-shod soles flying out from beneath them as they went down in a clattering heap of shields, limbs, and curses.
At the exact same instant, Yseld Arken dropped from the upper ledge of the cut stone pier.
