True to her word, Captain Hest Vale didn’t launch an immediate cavalry charge down the dry stream wash.
With an injured corporal requiring four troopers in relays to carry his cloak-litter. Her two ridge skirmishers still bruised from the rockslide, the mobile patrol was tactically encumbered. To force six heavy cavalry mounts down the steep, boulder-choked ravine after a four-person party on foot would have risked broken horse-fetlocks and another ambush.
Instead, Captain Vale did what disciplined border commanders had done for hundreds of years. She detached her two lightest scouts to shadow the expedition from the high ground.
For five miles through the heat of the afternoon, as Kezra’s party marched south through the narrowing fiery hall, the two grey-coated scouts remained on the eastern ridge crest. They moved three hundred paces back and two hundred arm-lengths high, skipping from dark rock spur to dark rock spur with the silent, rhythmic persistence of hunting wolves.
The southern valley broadened with every mile, shedding the claustrophobic fiery walls of Blackglass to reveal a lonely, wind-scoured expanse of grey shale and red fiery tuff.
To the west, the jagged teeth of the Spine marched toward the horizon, their snow-dusted summits catching the late afternoon sun like rows of polished iron spear-tips. To the east and south, the land fell away in vast, stepped plateaus toward the blinding bitter salt haze of Saltglass, twelve miles distant and shimmering like a lake of frozen animal fat under the autumn sky.
