Separating at the edge of the dead ground ditch needed no spoken fanfare. Davren and Fellis slipped into the shadow of a dry-stone retaining wall that had once supported an orchard terrace. He settled themselves behind a screen of thorny dog-rose where they could lay out the wooden sighting rule and anchor the measuring cord to a firmly bedded granite boulder.
Kezra and Yseld moved uphill in a crouching run, darting between the frost-split boulders of the western scree. The slope was steep. Nearly thirty-five degrees of loose dark grey rock shale that shifted like dry peas underfoot if a boot was planted with too much heel. Kezra followed Yseld’s exact footprints, placing her toes sideways along the contour lines and using the rubber-tipped metal ring of her sounding rod as an improvised third point of support.
Because her left ear heard only the high, sibilant hiss of the mountain wind, she relied entirely on Yseld’s visual hand signals to monitor the guard post above. Every time Yseld’s left palm flattened against the rock, Kezra froze in place. Her cheek was pressed against the cold lichen of a boulder. Meanwhile, the distant clink of a sentry’s axe-spear or the cough of a crossbowman drifted down from the curtain wall. The wind on the exposed slope smelled of rotten-egg coal smoke from the castle armory and the stale grease of cooking pots, carried on a cold downdraught from the northern crags.
