Hall Mistress Soran didn’t need to hear Ilyra’s shout.
The white-hot fragments of the eastern rim spun out into the gorge. Then, the deaf spearwoman was already across the iron boundary peg. Moving with the low, flat-footed drive of a dockhand hauling a flooded net before the next wave hits the pier, Soran hooked her braced right arm around the waist of Nara Soth’s blood-soaked coat. She planted her left boot against the second cairn, and dragged both Nara and Ilyra backward across the five paces of frost into the dark rock recess.
Daro Kesh and Bel Sar caught them inside the doorway door post. They lifted Nara’s heels clear of the iron boundary peg as Soran pivoted and slammed the crooked point of her iron spear back into the guard groove across the threshold.
“Down by the inner wall—on her stomach, not her back!” Commander Keth Or ordered sharply. He swept a folded wool blanket across the flat stone bench in the recess to clear away the granite grit.
Ilyra and Bel Sar lowered Nara gently onto her front across the bench, with her head turned toward the doorway so she could breathe and her pinned left sleeve hanging clear of the stone. Using the small bronze field knife from the hospice packet, Keth Or slit the blood-heavy wool of her coat up the center seam from waist to collar and folded the two halves open. Meanwhile, Vaska Ren knelt on the other side with his sound right hand…
