By mid-morning the limestone caverns gave way to a steep, frost-bitten mule track that climbed out between two shoulders of dark slate, and there above the timberline stood Kesh.
The town did not sit on a mountain so much as crouch underneath a dead one. Centuries before the wars of the Ashen Spear, some immense beast had died across the saddle of the pass, and its two horns—or antlers, each thicker at the root than a village grain-tower and branching into forty pale, weathered arches—still bridged the gorge from cliff to cliff. The people of Kesh had built their slate-roofed houses directly under that ribwork of bone. Higher up, where snowmelt ran down grooves carved along the underside of the giant tines, wooden troughs carried water into hanging gardens braced right into the forks of the antlers. Even in late autumn, rows of frost-hardened cabbages, winter leeks, and dry bean-vines hung suspended above the narrow streets, dripping cold meltwater onto the cobbles below.
“Mind the grease-water on the stones,” Kiv said quietly as they halted in a quarryman’s turn-out half a mile below the south toll-arch. “And keep the wolves behind the lime-kiln wall. Kesh drovers know temple iron when they see it, even without the collar badges.”
