Leyline Sniper

The Leyline Sniper on the Vanguard's ridge-roll is Ridge-Marksman Adaeze Fenwick, age thirty, nine years on the Hedra ridge and the only marksman on the muster whose rifle is chambered for nothing. The rifle is white wood and gold, Aegis-made, and it fires the leyline: the shot is drawn up through the ground into the stock and out of the barrel, which is why she lies prone to fire it and why the Vanguard's doctrine office has stopped ordering her to stand. Standing costs the shot a second the line is drawn from, and she has explained this to three majors, and the third one lay down on the ridge beside her to see, and the shot went where she said it would, and the major has not raised the posture question again.

Her combat-grant is patience made into an instrument. The scope is three lenses that float in front of her eye, unmounted, and she has never touched them; the armourers say the lenses arrange themselves to the shooter's patience, closer for the hasty, wider for the calm, and that Fenwick's sit further apart than any on the muster and have moved apart twice more since she was issued them. She finds the ridge before anyone has decided the battle is real, spends ten or fifteen minutes on her stomach reading the wind and the pollen and the way the grass leans when something heavy walks downslope, and lets the lenses settle. Then the line comes up through the ground. The Vanguard's after-action reports describe the engagement, uniformly, as having ended a little before it began.

She has refused the front line four times this season. Each time she has come back with the reason not to, and the argument between Fenwick and the doctrine major over whether the ridge is wasting her or correctly using her is now in its fourth year and is, the major concedes, being won by the ridge. She reads the Sky-Skipper's mail drops on the ridge — Juno Adair drops the Vanguard's ridge-post from a hundred feet and has never missed the cairn — and has left Adair a note in the cairn, once, that read 'you had ninety seconds left,' which Adair has kept. Reach-Sergeant Hallorin of the inner gate has told nobody that he considers her lenses the only other instrument on the muster that keeps its own distance. Fenwick knows. The lenses moved a little further apart the week she found out.