darkened blade_ A fallen blade novel - Kelly McCullough Page 0,73

was normally a major premium on hiding in darkness. Flashy signals were generally a thing of last resort, so we’d never developed a system for using them to communicate, as we had with the squeeze code. I made a mental note to add that to my list of things to do if I ever got to really settle into the role of First Blade. Then I paused and reviewed the chain of thought that had gotten me there. . . . Squeeze code, hmmm.

There might be something there. It was a rudimentary form of communication used between Blades on those rare occasions where we might be working together and need to communicate wordlessly. There were no more than fifty words, all of them of the yes, no, stop, go variety, and they were transmitted by holding hands and squeezing. What if I pulsed the light I was sending down to Kelos . . . ? I tried the sequence for “alert,” repeating it twice and then stopping.

Kelos flashed it back at me a moment later, followed by “safe,” and “in place.” He had caught on instantly, and the play was moving again. Fifty words isn’t much, but it allowed me to figure out that Kelos had shot out the end of the canyon and passed right on over the trail and the edge of the deep valley it skirted here. He’d had little choice at that point except to keep going, until he landed on a slope on the far side. From there, he’d eventually slithered his way down to the trail again where it continued on that side. Or, at least, that’s what I think he was telling me. In any case, he wanted the rest of us to come ahead and join him.

With that established, I signaled back up the valley, hoping that the many smaller waterfalls I’d passed over wouldn’t block my signal. After a few minutes of flashing spell-light up the canyon, I was beginning to think that I couldn’t reach them either. But then, finally, I got an answering flash. I tried my new idea for emulating squeeze code with spell-light, signaling “safe” and “come.” It was a simple enough concept once it occurred to a person, and I wasn’t surprised when someone up there signaled “yes” back at me. And “I come.”

Since I wanted the sail-jumpers to pass over me and go on down to join Kelos, I stopped lighting things up once I got that and sent a message to Kelos instead, telling him I would signal him when I wanted him to provide a light for the sail-jumpers to steer toward. Not long after that, I saw the first of a series of barely visible blots of darkness pass high above me, up near the top of the canyon. Once I was sure whoever it was had passed beyond the falls, I signaled Kelos.

An hour later we were all assembled on the trail far below, with only one broken arm, two sprained wrists, and a dislocated shoulder spread across four of our youngsters by way of an injuries-incurred list. I got the rest of the story from Kelos then.

Overshooting the trail and the valley meant that he had landed more than a mile’s hike below where he expected to come down, an all but impossible distance, given conditions and the waterfall he would have had to climb at the end of it. Sensibly, he’d decided to wait there for a bit, sending signals back in the direction he thought the canyon must lie. He wanted to see if some better solution presented itself before he tried to make the long icy hike back up to the base of the canyon.

We had come down close to two thousand feet between the canyon run and the long steep glide from there to the segment of trail where Kelos finally ended up. There was snow down here, but significantly less of it than where we’d started from. It was warmer here, too, and not long after we started making our slow way along the trail, the snow shifted over into a frigid, brutal rain that slowly melted the way clear.

There were still icy patches here and there for the rest of that day and into the next, so we went slowly and roped together. The damp cold made a map of my body, pointing out every major scar and deep injury I’d ever suffered in fine detail. But after a long, slow, miserable twenty hours