The entrance to the boundary transit canopy was an eighty-yard tunnel of corrugated iron arches, bolted to granite retaining walls that had been raised forty years earlier to protect the northern mountain pass from winter rockfalls. For twelve years, it had served a darker purpose. It was the threshold where the artificial, high-pressure night of Rookvale ended and the outside world began.
Inside the canopy, the air was dense, cold, and smelled of wet ballast, copper soot, and the bitter reek of creosote. Dim copper lanterns, hung from iron hooks every twenty paces, cast pools of sickly green light across the wet crushed stone of the roadway. The iron arches dripped constantly—a dirty, sulfur-stained cooled water that hissed as it struck the hot glass of the fixtures. Beyond the far end of the tunnel, three hundred yards up the frozen gravel road, the darkness looked different—lighter, cleaner, stirred by a fierce northern mountain wind that carried no trace of machine oil, stale flour, or boiling sulfur.
Len Vey stood waiting at the entrance arch, his back braced against an iron tie-beam. His sounding pole rested in the crook of his sound right elbow, its iron shoe planted firmly in the slush. His braced left arm was throbbing with an intense, sickening heat that made his vision swim whenever the wind gusted. But he stood upright, his Tern Road courier cap pulled down over his gray eyes. The linen wraps across his chest were cold with sleet. His boots were crusted…
