The wind at sixty feet below the low roof wall was not a breeze. It was a physical wall of freezing ice needles that tore at Ren’s clothes and whipped his hair into his eyes.
He swung in a terrifying fifteen-foot arc over the lightless void, his boots kicking against empty air, the hemp rope groaning as it rubbed against the granite overhang forty feet above. Clinging to his back like an overgrown leather tick, Ren-the-Cinder was sobbing in rhythmic gasps, his fingernails digging through Ren’s wool coat into his shoulder blades.
“Twelve strands!” Cinder shrieked against the roar of the gale. “The outer core of the thick ship rope is twenty-four-gauge carbon steel! In sixty seconds, the dreadnought’s forward winch is going to cycle its second high-pressure stroke! When that metal tube fires, the tension rises to forty tons! If you’re touching the ring when forty tons snaps, the backlash will cut you in half like a pair of sheep shears!”
“Then stop screaming and hold the lantern!” Ren shouted back, his teeth shaking from the cold.
With a final, sickening jolt, the belay rope lowered them onto the summit of the Pinnacle of Crows.
The pinnacle was a platform no larger than a butcher’s block. Four feet of jagged, frost-slicked dark rock jutting out from the sheer cliff face like an amputated finger. Ren slammed both knees onto the rock, his boots finding two shallow crevices, his left hand clamping onto a rusted iron eyebolt drilled into the…
