The iron bar was cold enough to bite through Liu's gloves, its hooked end still dusted with gray grit from the tower's foundation. It had been forged to find weak seams in stone and pry them wider. The wall no longer needed opening. That meant the tool had to solve a different problem.
Dust caught in his throat as it had at Suzdal, dry enough to scrape with every breath. That wall had stood three heartbeats longer than he'd warned the ram crew it would. He'd misjudged the stone, and those three heartbeats had cost two men their legs.
Since then he'd learned to read walls better, watching for the small signs that told him when masonry was ready to fail. Even so, he never trusted his judgment completely. Stone had a way of proving a man wrong at the worst possible moment.
Two reasons had put him at the base of the collapse instead of beside the bombards with the rest of his crew.
