The wind on the Devil’s Pulpit didn’t blow. It hammered like an iron mallet against the granite face.
Eight hundred feet above the gatehouse, perched on a spur of rock no wider than a tavern table, the wooden platform of the ancient signal bright light groaned under the dead weight of the two-ton harbor giant crossbow. The four-inch oak decking had been heavy with salvaged mine timbers, clamped to the rock with forged iron brackets. Then he lashed to the mountain face with three-inch hemp cables soaked in salt water to prevent frost-shear.
Ren Vale knelt behind the heavy timber carriage, both hands clamped onto the greased oak cheek-pieces until his knuckles turned as white as salt.
The dizziness was a living, starving beast coiled in his chest. Every time his eyes drifted past the jagged edge of the platform into the swirling copper mist below, his inner ear spun in violent revulsion. The mountain seemed to dissolve beneath him. That left him suspended in a freezing void where gravity pulled not downward, but sideways toward the hungry expanse of the sky. He couldn’t stand. He couldn’t look at the horizon. He kept his forehead pressed against the brass height side mounted to the giant crossbow’s pivot pin, reciting the space-folding specifications of the timber carriage just to keep his sanity anchored.
