The scrub juniper on the eastern shoulder of the ridge clung to the rock in low, gnarled mats, its dark needles stiff with frost.
Yseld Arken dropped onto her right knee behind a rounded shoulder of grey granite. She extended her hooked climbing staff horizontally behind her back—the universal signal to halt and take cover.
Without a sound, Kezra Venn, Paxa Sel, and miner Voss sank into the shadow of the rock rib. Kezra reached back with her right hand. It caught the horsehair measuring cord before its lead knots could click against the loose scree. Voss lowered his sack of iron wedges to the gravel with exquisite, tiny fraction of an inch-tiny care, muffling the steel tools between his knees so not a single iron clang could echo off the cirque walls.
A mile to the east, across a deep, shadowed ice-slow trough, a six-man Cairn Host infantry patrol was crossing a parallel ridge.
Through the clear mountain air, the glint of their polished cone-shaped sallets and iron-tipped axe-spears showed stark against the pale yellow grass of the lower saddle. They marched in tight, disciplined file. Soldiers sent out from Stonewake Citadel to monitor the old northern approaches after the scout raid on Alderfast had failed five days earlier.
