The stone spiral of the southern watchtower was cold as a glacier, the draft whistling through the narrow arrow loops with the sound of drawn steel. Kezra Venn climbed the final eight steps to the open watching low roof wall, her breath steady. Her right hand held the brass barrel of a three-draw naval spyglass.
Behind her came Yseld Arken, her wool mantle pinned tight against the gale with a brass ring brooch. It carried Fellis Dain’s four-shape wooden signal board slung over her shoulder. Fellis himself followed close behind, his boots moving lightly across the frost-glazed treads despite his braced left arm, his pocket field slate tucked securely under his broad leather belt.
From the high southern low roof wall of Stonewake, sixty paces above the sheer drop of the outer cliffs, the world unfolded in vast, blinding sweeps of stone, ice, and pale winter sky. Below them to the south lay the deep, bowl-shaped basin of Alderfast, where thin ribbons of woodsmoke drifted up from the farms and the lower sorting yards. To the north and east rose the monstrous, snow-capped wall of the Spine, its jagged ridges cutting the blue air like shattered black glass, separating the populated basins from the uninhabited wastes of the high inside.
