At first light they climbed past the lip of the abandoned strip-quarry and reached the stone bridgehead where the gorge narrowed. Suth’s wooden beetle marched up to the cracked granite anchor block, tapped its carved front legs twice against a rusted iron eyebolt, and folded its legs underneath its body. The trail went no further on this side of the chasm.
Ahead of them, the old suspension bridge sagged between two squat stone towers. Twenty feet of planking near the center had rotted away, leaving only the two main wrist-thick iron chains and a web of thin sway-wires above a five-hundred-foot drop into white river fog.
Every foot of those chains was black with storm crows.
They were nearly as big as geese, with heavy hooked beaks and stiff, barbed feathers that stood half-erect in the damp wind. The air around the bridge tasted like a copper coin held against the tongue. Even while the party stood thirty paces back behind a low stone wall, blue-white threads of static crawled along the birds’ wing-tips and snapped from beak to tail with a noise like dry twigs breaking underfoot.
“Look at the baskets under the middle span,” Ysabet murmured, resting her left hand on the cold stone wall and keeping her bent right hand tucked inside her coat.
