The stair ended in a fan of frost-shattered grey scree where the cliff wall met the bottom of the gorge.
Alder scrub and stunted mountain willow grew crookedly along a dry wash below the rubble. The afternoon light down here was already thin and bluish, cut off early by the sheer bulk of the observatory plateau towering overhead.
Pip was the first to step off the broken bottom tread onto the gravel. Halfway down the scree fan, it stopped and turned its head toward a low hollow beneath an overhanging boulder.
Above its two amber eyes, the pale forked door mark stood out clearly against its dark hide, though it did not widen the way it did beside a dying breath. Whatever lay in the hollow had been still for a long time.
Ysabet walked down the sliding stones, keeping her left hand on her walking stick for balance.
Beneath the overhang, half-covered by a shallow pile of flat river cobbles that recent rain had partially washed away, lay the body of an iron wolf.
It was not one of the three live wolves—Siv, Tern, or Moth—that Osha had mentioned traveling with the handler Kiv on the lower road. This one had fallen from the narrow cliff trace above weeks earlier, when the first autumn frost split the shale lip; a jagged fracture across its iron-plated shoulder and neck showed where it had struck the boulder on the way down. Flood runoff from the wash had shifted the lower stones…
