With Hall Mistress Soran’s left arm locked firmly around Nara Soth’s waist and the bent plain iron spear planted in Soran’s right hand as a third leg, the two older women stepped out through the narrow western side-seam of the dark rock recess. Their first two strides over the frost-glazed shale were uneven. Nara’s knees stiff from twenty years in the summit lattice and the deep third-watch cut across her back, Soran’s right boot compensating for the twenty-degree bend in her iron shaft. By the third stride, however, their shoulders settled into a shared, limping rhythm that carried them steadily outward along the granite shelf away from the doomed overhang.
Moving half a pace behind their inner flank, Seyun felt his Early Jade Answering Edge revise its shape in real time. A breath earlier, when he had first dived back to the threshold, his staff had been braced against a fixed stone-built point to keep the top door beam from dropping. Now that Nara and Soran had chosen to walk out of the shelter, the protected purpose of his Jade was no longer a stationary piece of rock. It was a moving three-pace pocket of space that traveled at the exact speed of two wounded women supporting each other across the ice.
