By late afternoon the steaming green basin of the Unbound camp had dropped out of sight behind two shoulders of gray limestone, and the air smelled of wet slate, cold pine needles, and high mountain fog.
The track into the northern canyons was barely a goat path, winding between sheer walls of pale layered stone that rose three hundred feet overhead and pinched the sky into a narrow gray ribbon. In the days before the moth fortress, Mother Suth’s long-legged wooden beetle had walked ahead of them on the rocks, unfolding from her staff to point out firm footing and old water seams with the quiet certainty of someone who had walked the road a dozen times before.
Now the wooden beetle was gone, lost in the night wind above the fortress roof, and the plain ash walking staff in Ysabet’s left hand was only good, solid wood.
No single person in the line held the whole way forward anymore.
At every fork where a dry wash split the canyon floor, Osha had to stop, pull Suth’s journal from her coat, and squint through the mist to match the bearings she had copied from Iskren’s elk-hide map against the water stains on the cliff wall. Twenty paces ahead of her, Chaska walked with one hand on Lilt’s shoulder harness, watching how the sandray lifted her broad nostrils to read the downdrafts spilling out of side fissures where a rockslide or a dead end blocked the air. Behind them, Ashaun used…
