The first cold wash of true dawn broke over the High Crags of the Spine on the eighty-third day. It was a pale, merciless light the color of chilled zinc, scouring the shadows from the upright limestone cliffs and turning the frost-rimmed ledges into sharp, razor-edged silhouettes against the pale blue sky.
From their hidden recess twelve feet below the outer rock shelf, Kezra Venn peered through the sighting cleft. Her brass sighting compass was held steady in her right hand.
The solitary figure on the camp stool had not moved. He sat forty paces above them on the lip of the upper service court, his grey wool coat buttoned to the chin. His breath drifted in small, rhythmic plumes of white vapor into the freezing air. Now that the dawn light filled the court, Kezra could see his features with crystal clarity.
He was a man in his mid-fifties, with short-cropped iron-grey hair showing beneath a close-fitting felt cap. His face was deeply lined, weathered to the texture of cured rawhide by thirty years of exposure to high-sky sun, biting wind, and the glare of mountain snow. His nose was crooked—broken long ago by a falling stone or an unbending transit tripod—and his grey eyes were calm, watchful, and fully empty of military hostility.
