The wind outside the cave mouth hit like a wet shovel.
For three days the geothermal fissures had kept the air thick with sulfur steam and damp heat. Stepping out onto the frost-cracked shale below the Fortress of Sleeping Wings turned the sweat inside Ysabet’s wool shirt icy in the space of two breaths. Her bruised left ribs tightened around the cold air, and she had to pause with her good left hand braced against the rock lip until the stitch in her side eased.
At her boot, Pip hunched all six legs under its body and let out a dry kettle click. Beneath the scarred seam of its translucent shell, three pale points of light flared like pinched embers.
“Cover,” Ashaun muttered, squinting through the blowing snow down the switchback trail. She held Suth’s empty wooden walking staff wedged under her stone left forearm while her right hand drew a strip of oiled canvas over Pip’s back. “A lantern under a blanket shows half a mile in grey weather.”
Pip tucked its moss-bound antlers lower and tried to dim the glow inside its chest. The lights faded to a dull tallow smudge, then winked bright again when a gust rattled the loose slate overhead. Since leaving the quartz predator’s caves, every surprise or sharp chill set the new spots burning, and every flare took a little more warmth out of the creature’s thin back folds.
