The punched holes in iron grating of the walkway ended suddenly at a spreading joint bolted into the raw dark rock face of the ridge.
Beyond that joint lay the mouth of the Narrow Cut.
It was an artificial trench carved seventy years earlier for the high-pressure drainage channel and the backup coal line. The upright granite walls climbed sixty feet straight toward the lightless sky. Their quarried faces wept streams of cold, stone-black water that collected in stale gutters between the rotting cedar ties. The air between the rock walls hung dense and dead. It smelled of stale sulfur silt, rotting water-cress, and ancient wet lime plaster that had washed down from the defunct kilns above.
Len Vey cleared the final iron pipe rim with a low vault, his right boot landing squarely on a waterlogged oak sleeper.
The mud beneath the tie was thick as axle grease. It sucked at the welt of his heavy courier boot with a wet, squelching pushback that threatened to drag his ankle out of true, but his Surefoot milestone registered the uneven shear before his knee could twist. His pelvis tilted, his thigh muscles locked against the dynamic load. He drove the steel tip of his ash sounding pole twelve inches into the ballast to anchor his balance.
