Kiv came down the upper mule switchback ten minutes after the fourth-watch horn, walking at the loose, flat-footed pace of a handler who had been on cold shale since daybreak. Siv walked at his left knee, Tern a half-length behind, and Moth out on the right flank where the ditch dropped toward the eastern rope yard.
At the timber barricade, Corporal Marek lifted a pitch torch, squinted at the three iron-gray backs in the fog, and lowered his spear butt to the gravel.
“Thought the canyon swallowed you four days back, Kiv,” the corporal said, spitting into the ditch. “Where’s the fourth dog?”
“Dead above the frost line,” Kiv said evenly. “Precentor still in the first pavilion?”
“In the map room behind the windlass. Go on through before they scrape the barley pot.”
Kiv left the three wolves unhooked on the gravel apron beside the eastern rope yard, fifty paces from the outer fence where the ridge climbed toward the cooling vents, and gave them the quiet palm-down stay. Then he walked between the guy-ropes to the command pavilion.
When the tent flap parted, Precentor Edris Keth looked up from a table covered in core-sample cylinders and brass calipers. For a second the tall priest looked every year of his age—gray around the temples, coat cuffs stained with limestone slurry, shoulders stooped from sleeping on a camp cot. Then he saw who was standing in the doorway, and the lines around his mouth softened with unmistakable relief.
