The left-hand fissure was not built for anything with wings.
Within thirty paces of the rockfall, the limestone walls pinched inward until Chaska’s folded cargo frame scraped on both sides at once, and the ceiling dropped low enough that she had to walk with her neck bent. Behind her, Lilt had to tuck her broad gliding fins in tight rolls over her spine, shuffling sideways over the jagged floor on her short walking legs like a crab in a drainpipe. Every time the sandray’s leathery wing-knuckle bumped a sharp drip-stone, she let out a low, aggrieved whistle, though she kept her snout close to Pip’s tail and never once tried to turn back.
Chaska carried their single small brass hand-lamp in her right hand and steadied the top of her pack frame with her left so the mouse’s wooden box wouldn’t jolt against the rock. Even in the dim yellow puddle of the lamp, she could see that one of the two navigation mirrors lashed to the outer strut had taken a hard knock during the pillar collapse; the brass rim was bent flat and a pale crack ran across the glass.
After ten minutes of blind, scraping climb, the crack widened into a low dome no bigger than a village bake-oven, where a trickle of cold snow-seep dripped down the wall into a dry gravel pocket.
