Getting down the basalt ravine to the base of the frozen waterfall took forty minutes of careful rope work.
Because Ysabet could not brace a climbing line across her bruised left ribs without losing her breath, Chaska and Ashaun rigged a simple waist-belay around a jammed chockstone at the top of the gully. Ashaun snubbed the hemp rope around her translucent stone left forearm—letting the rough fibers slide smoothly across the pale mineral surface while her right hand controlled the slack—so Ysabet could walk backward down the icy stone steps using her left hand and Suth’s ash staff for balance. Lilt glided down in two short, banking turns between the narrow black walls, landing neatly on a gravel bar at the bottom where Chaska dismantled the widest struts of the cargo-gliding frame and lashed them flat against the harness for underground travel.
Right behind a thirty-foot curtain of blue-green waterfall ice, the black arch of the geothermal cave mouth yawned open in the cliff base.
A slow, steady exhalation of warm air drifted out of the dark archway, smelling faintly of wet limestone, warm iron, and sulfur springs. Where the warm draft met the freezing mountain air along the lip of the overhang, thick white hoarfrost grew in feathery fringes six inches long.
