Kiv went forward alone as far as the first spoil heap, keeping all three wolves behind him with a flat drop of his wrist. Tern and Moth sat on their haunches in the wet bracken; Siv lay down between them with his chin resting carefully on his right forepaw to keep the swollen left side of his jaw off the stones.
After two minutes Kiv came back up the gravel bank, wiping a smear of dark axle-grease from his knuckles onto a dry Dock leaf.
“Twelve-man crew, maybe fourteen,” he said, keeping his voice under the sound of the stream. “The prints are from yesterday afternoon, before the evening mist settled. They used a block-and-tackle anchored to that split cedar to haul the heavy sled through the cut. The timber shoring is still groaning. Whoever Edris left to watch the inner mouth of the trench won’t be more than a bowshot beyond the rubble.”
Osha stared at the discarded mule harness half-buried in chalk dust. The leather collar was stamped with the small three-bar archive mark of the lower temple stables. “He didn’t follow us over the high marsh or the beetle canyon. He took the south wagon road through the salt passes with fresh teams waiting at the relay stations.”
