The road linking River Ward to Orchard Ward climbed three hundred feet up the eastern flank of the valley along the ancient Agricultural Switchbacks. A series of steep, stone-paved terraces built forty years ago to haul produce from the glass greenhouses down to the river barges. In the twelve years of darkness, the switchbacks had decayed into an overgrown, dangerous maze of rotting timber trellises, dead blackberry vines, and freezing black mud that threatened to drag the freight wagons over the cliff edge.
Because Len Vey had ordered the nonstop telegraph lines cut two hours earlier to prevent Chancellor Morn from tracking the coalition’s movements through regional voltage spikes, the column moved under strict sight and foot-courier discipline. Every two hundred paces along the winding road, a pair of runners stood beneath a hooded copper lantern mounted to a roadside milestone, checking the identity tokens of passing carts and signaling the rear-guard with shuttered brass lanterns.
Len walked in the center of the column, his boots sinking into the wet leaf-litter that choked the gutters. His braced left arm was throbbing with a dull, sickening fever heat inside its ash casing, the jarring impact of every uphill stride sending sharp spikes of pain through his fractured radius. He used his brass sounding pole with his uninjured right hand, not for balance, but to feel the underground channels humming beneath the flat stone slabs.
