While the main assault raged at the wagon wall, eight Black Scythe hired blades had scaled the steep southern rock face on foot. He carried heavy twelve-pound sledgehammers and pitch torches, aiming straight for the promontory where Nessa Vale stood beside the earth-measuring transit.
They scrambled over the limestone rim, their iron-shod boots scraping on the rock. In the lead was a lanky mercenary with a scarred cheek, raising his sledgehammer to shatter the cedar transit case.
“Smash the brass!” he snarled.
Nessa Vale didn’t step back.
Beside her stood Martha and two refugee women, tending a five-gallon copper kettle of boiling water and wood-ash lye that had been simmering over a charcoal fire bowl for water distillation. Martha gripped the heavy iron ladle, scooped a quart of the boiling, skin-burning solution. Then he hurled it directly into the lead attacker’s face.
The boiling lye struck the mercenary’s chest and chin, the sharp bitter-salt burn making him scream in agony as he dropped the sledgehammer and clawed at his eyes.
At the same instant, Nessa brought up her sixteen-foot ash land-mapper’s leveling staff. She used it as a two-handed quarterstaff. She drove the iron-shod shoe of the staff with pinpoint accuracy into the solar nerve web of the second attacker. The heavy brass fittings hit with the force of an iron crowbar, knocking the wind from the man’s lungs and sending him tumbling backward down the scree.
