Three miles to the south, at a height of one hundred and twenty meters above the valley floor, the narrow limestone pass of the Gate Ward was choked with freezing mountain mist.
Bram Ash crouched behind a pile of discarded rail ties thirty yards from the outer edge fence of the official customs depot. His wounded right shoulder was bound in dark, blood-stiffened linen that smelled of antiseptic wash and dried bile, the bullet wound from the oil depot raid throbbing with a dull, sickening heat that made his vision blur whenever he turned his neck. His uniform coat was stripped of its city court brass badges, the dark woolen fabric torn along the collar where he had ripped away the insignia of twelve years of state service.
Beside him in the damp grass knelt his daughter Heth.
She was sixteen years old, thin as a willow lath, her small shoulders wrapped in a giant wool worker’s coat that had belonged to her mother. A woolen scarf was tied tightly around her mouth and nose to filter the freezing mountain fog. But her chest rattled with every breath. A dry, rasping wheeze that sounded like dry gravel sliding inside a tin pail. The bitter salt dust of the salt wards and the sulfur fumes of the lower tram sheds had permanently scarred her lung tissue during the third year of the darkness. That left her with chronic lung damage that no country clinic could treat.
