They resumed their advance past the twenty-seventh station as full morning light—pale, sunless, and silver-grey—settled over the high northern shelf. Instructors Venn and Kori walked at the rear with their iron spears held low against their thighs, their eyes darting between the cliff overhang fifty feet above and the sheer thousand-foot drop into the frozen gorge on their right.
As they crossed the midpoint of the three-hundred-pace road. There, the dressed slate blocks were fitted so tightly together that not even a knife blade could slip between the seams, Seyun noticed a subtle change in the air pressing against his cheeks and ears. It was the same air-pressure heaviness he had felt inside the chimney fissure below the stone guardian’s ledge, multiplied fivefold.
Every breath of cold air he drew into his lungs tasted faintly of spark-charged bronze and crushed quartz. Beneath his boots, the grey slate no longer felt like dead mountain rock. It felt taut and ringing, like the wooden soundboard of a massive zither strung with cables of underground iron.
Walking two paces ahead of Seyun, Daro Kesh shifted his weight onto his right boot to step around the thirty-fourth kneeling station. His heel came down on the frosted slate. Then, a loose pebble of hard black rock no larger than a walnut—carried on the welt of his boot from the back gate switchbacks—skittered sideways across the polished stone.
