Len Vey stood beside the low dark rock low roof wall on the cooling court terrace, systematically auditing the gear secured to his chest with the cold, unrushed care of a postal carrier preparing for an unlit winter stage run.
The southern wind was blowing harder now. It swept over the twelve-hundred-foot cliff with a steady, dry roar that scoured the frost from the granite flat stone slabs. Through the expanding breach in the southern sky, the star-pattern of the Hunter had risen four fingers above the Sentinel Crags, its three icy belt stars burning blue, sharp, and unmoving in the clear mountain air.
Len didn’t look at the stars. A courier who looked at the stars when checking his harness was a courier who missed a cracked buckle or a frayed trace.
He looked down at his own torso.
His left arm was a dead weight. Wrapped within three straight cedar slats and bound to his ribs by four wraps of tarred linen, the arm was a rigid wooden post that could neither lift, grip, nor absorb moving shock. Every deep breath he drew sent a sharp, throbbing reminder through the fractured radius beneath the wood, an ache that synced with his pulse. He couldn’t carry a thirty-pound courier pack. He couldn’t haul himself up an upright iron ladder two-handed. And he couldn’t swing an axe against a barred wooden door.
