The wind on the open ridge of the Razor-Spires didn’t blow in gusts. It fell like sheets of snapped lead.
Two miles above the cloud deck, the air was so dry that every breath scraped the lining of Ren’s throat like dry foam-stone. The trail beneath their boots was barely eighteen inches wide. A dangerous shelf of fractured dark rock slick with blue ice-slow ice. It was bordered on the left by a sheer granite wall that vanished into the howling gale, and on the right by a four-thousand-foot upright plunge into an ocean of rolling white mist.
Ren walked with his head down, his wool scarf pulled over the bridge of his nose. His right hand gripped his heavy oak walking stick. Every five paces, his left foot caught on the scree, the blunt-force trauma from the Vulcan foundries throbbing with a dull, sickening heat behind his kneecap.
Yet it wasn’t the pain in his knee that made his stomach churn with cold nausea.
It was the ground.
At midday, the sun broke through a rift in the storm clouds—a pale, lemon-yellow eye burning in a sky of hard slate blue. The light struck the snowdrift banked against the cliff wall. That turned the frozen crust into a blinding field of diamond needles.
