"We must find a way to keep sending without using the glancer."

A "glancer" was now standard battle equipment on the eastern front.

Swift-Killer moved her eye until she could see the center of the glancer through the hole.

"The glancer almost wouldn't fit through that narrow crevasse."

"That invention of the glancer has given you a reputation among the astrologers here at the Institute.

'This curved shape for a glancer means that it can send a beam of light a long way," she told him.

I have not seen anything around here that had anywhere near as shiny a cleavage surface as a glancer.

"This thing at the top of the cylinder looks like a glancer in a holder, and these other things look like my expander."

Swift-Killer went to the broken glancer, picked up one of the larger shards and pouched it.

Swift-Killer emptied out her pouches, especially the bulky glancer she had been carrying, and moved steadily on up the canyon.

As Swift-Killer approached the edge of the cliff, she pulled the glancer shard from a pouch.

The flat glancer mirror was propped up at an angle against a nearby cliff, and the curved expander was placed a slight distance away.

She constantly reminded herself to hold tightly to the vial; if it fell, the expander would be shattered in as many shreds as the glancer.

She pouched the vial, and then finally turned her attention to the base of the nearby cliff where the glittering shards of the broken glancer lay in a shattered heap.

Soon a disciplined pulsation of light was beaming its way up to the Eyes, continuing the message that had been interrupted a dozen turns ago when the glancer had fallen from the face of the cliff.

"It's not the body but a woman's ever undressed face that most men find enticing," he writes, "the undefended and arousing glance that betrays exactly what the glancer sees in you, exactly what she's found.

"I should hope so, after all the work we did to get here," Swift-Killer said crankily as she struggled to scrape a notch for the curved expander in the fuzzy crust some distance away from the glancer.

They still used the old code patterns for the commands, since the limitations of the glancer communication system were similar to the old technique that used synchronized thumps of the treads of a trooper squad on the crust.

She first took the flat glancer mirror and set it on a mound of rubble at an angle until she could go off at a distance and see the Eyes of Bright reflected off the center of the mirror.

Swift-Killer again stuck her little glancer over the edge and watched as Cliff-Watcher pouched the expander, hauled it to the new position underneath Swift-Killer's waving manipulator, then repositioned it carefully on the crust and moved back.

Whether you are a keen follower of horoscopes or just a casual glancer, the chances are you won't miss your stars in each issue, which is why I'm delighted to welcome an extraordinarily talented new astrologer to Good Housekeeping.

Although some of the troopers soon became expert scalers, and even found a technique to get the awkward expander and glancer up the notch, almost one-third of the troopers were incapable of forcing themselves to climb up on the overhanging platforms.

Within less than a dozen turns, Swift-Killer had her own swift-sender set up in the compound of the local astrologers, and was beaming out picture after picture into a glancer set at an angle in the crust, to bounce up into the sky toward the Eyes of Bright.