With the two eighteen-inch pine slats strapped tightly along the outside of his torn right thigh and a thick pad of Mina’s boiled linen staunching the deep cut over the thigh bone, Daro Kesh could no longer bend his right knee or push off his right forefoot to sprint across open shale. Any try to charge into the center of the basin on the next watch would tear the vastus lateralis muscle apart inside the bandages and drop him helplessly on the ice.
Yet as Seyun and Commander Keth Or helped Daro shift his position two feet eastward into the notched granite angle of the recess’s outer eastern stone support prop, the Black-Roof swordmaster discovered a practical truth about the shape of the shelter corner. Here at the eastern mouth of the cleft, a natural waist-high shelf of black dark rock jutted outward like a smith’s vise-bench, with a deep upright groove in the rear rock wall where a man could wedge his braced right leg and his left hip so the mountain bedrock itself carried his standing weight.
Daro tested the notch. He slid his braced right leg straight and stiff into the rear upright groove. He planted his intact left boot flat against the forward stone step. Then he leaned his left shoulder blade hard into the granite corner post. Braced in that three-point stone socket, he didn’t need his right thigh muscles to move a single inch. His bones were wedged into the cliff like an oak…
