The rope was two inches of braided hemp soaked in salt water to prevent it from snapping in the sub-zero gale. It smelled of tar, fish glue, and the cold, stone emptiness of the deep pit.
Ren Vale stood on the outer low roof wall of the eastern castle wall, his boots braced against the frost-caked granite coping.
Ten inches ahead of his toes, the world ended.
There was no slope. There was no scree. There was only a sheer, four-thousand-foot upright plunge into a churning sea of gray and copper-tinted clouds. There, the wind screamed through the fluted gullies of Mount Khor-Vann with the sound of a thousand weeping women. Far above them, barely visible through the swirling mist, the massive silver belly of the Vitreous Giant beast drifted like an armored moon, its stern-screws beating a slow, bone-shaking rhythm that shook the air.
From the dreadnought’s forward winch-housing, a four-inch braided steel mooring thick ship rope hung down into the deep gap. It was anchored to the Pinnacle of Crows. A needle-thin spire of solitary granite that jutted from the canyon wall sixty feet below and thirty yards out from the castle low roof wall. The steel cable was under huge tension. It shook with a high-pitched, metal drone that sounded like an angry hornet the size of a carriage.
