By dawn of the tenth day—the fourth of seven dawns on Daro Kesh’s deeper Bronze echo—the soft willow mists and cabbage-garden loams of the river valley had vanished two thousand feet below the supply cart’s wheels. In their place rose the steep, wind-scoured switchbacks of the Hollow Summit’s lower flank. Tier after tier of rigid black mountain pine rooted directly into clefts of dark grey dark rock. It was separated by broad, level stone terraces where ancient hot springs had deposited thick white and yellow crusts of sulfur, banded limestone, and loadstone salt.
The cold up here had a different weight from the damp river frost of Oran. Even through his wool vest and patched hemp coat, Seyun could feel the dry, stone sharpness of the air tightening the skin over his cheekbones with every breath in. The iron-rimmed wheels of the supply cart rolled across one of the bare dark rock shelves between the pine belts. Each time, a low, nonstop shaking rose through the wooden axle and hummed against the soles of his boots.
It was the same heavy, downward-pressing deep-rock pulse that had filled the sunken wayside shrine at the Old Weir. Only here, on the flanks of the mountain itself, the pressure was not carried by a single buried bronze wire. The entire bedrock ridge was shaking like the soundboard of a huge, over-strung zither held under forty years of tension.
