The fifty-foot crescent of welded pale blades dropped toward the central dark rock semicircle. Then, Seyun automatically reached down with his left hand to hook Vaska Ren’s coat collar and haul the bruised former judge backward into the deep stone cleft behind them. In any ordinary mountain skirmish, carrying the slower, non-combatant specialist into cover while keeping one’s staff raised over his back was the gut duty of the younger fighter.
Before Seyun’s fingers could close on the coarse wool of Vaska’s coat, Vaska slapped Seyun’s wrist away with the flat of his leather sample-needle case.
The mute former Chief Judge’s dark eyes were fierce and utterly clear in the dropping white glare. With two sharp jabs of his index finger, Vaska pointed first at the low, two-foot-high granite overhang at the rear of the dark rock recess, then pointed straight across the open eastern shale apron where the crescent blade’s outer tip was thinnest. Then it finally shoved his open palm hard against Seyun’s chest. Signing a blunt, clear refusal: I have two hands and two knees to crawl under the rock. Stop playing nursemaid and break the target shape!
Without waiting for Seyun to agree, Vaska Ren dropped flat onto his belly in the frozen gravel and scrambled headfirst under the low granite lip of the dark rock recess like a badger diving into a quarry crack. He pulled his sample satchel and iron wedge in behind his boots so that zero inches of his dark shape remained…
