The third whistle hung in the damp air above the narrow high walkway, cold and pure as a silver bell struck in an empty vault.
Len Vey didn’t look up. He kept his eyes locked on the rough granite risers before his boots, his right arm rigid as an iron stay. His Surefoot took in the subtle shifts of the litter’s balance point as Bram Ash climbed behind him. A courier who looked up at an avalanche lost his footing on the scree. A courier who kept his eyes on the trail lived to deliver the mail. He took the final riser, planting his boot heel firmly on the iron threshold of the raised walkway.
They had reached the raised check narrow high walkway twenty feet above the railway tracks.
The walkway was an eighteen-inch-wide shelf of open iron grating, bolted to the upright dark rock cliff by massive three-sided brackets of forged iron spaced six feet apart. Beneath the punched holes in iron plates, the railway cutting fell away into a black gulf of drifting sulfur mist. There, the abandoned rubber-tired ambulance sat on the rails like an empty shell. Every step on the grating sent a faint metal shudder through the framework. But Len kept his weight centered directly over the load-bearing brackets. He avoided the loose center-plates where rust had eaten the rivets down to brittle pins.
