The limestone dust on Kezra Venn’s tongue tasted like old bone and dried creek bed.
She unclipped her round tin flask from the webbing of her canvas pack frame, inverted it over her open mouth. Then she waited while three warm, brownish drops collected at the rolled lip before falling onto the center of her tongue. That was the last of it. Forty minutes remained on the guild judge’s brass-collared sandglass across the deep gap, her left calf was knotted into a hard cramp beneath her wool gaiter. The final cross of the regional adventurer check was still eighty paces of greasy shale and frost-cracked rock away from where she stood.
Across the ravine, the wind off the high Spine mountains blew clean and cold. He smelled faintly of old snow, crushed juniper, and wet slate. Every two or three minutes, a heavy, flat strike rolled out across the gorge. The deep bronze bell at the summit platform ringing as another tester finished their ascent.
Dong.
The note had no music in it. It was thick, town, and final, the sort of chime that a toll warden struck. Just then, a timber cart cleared the gate with its freight duty paid in full. To Kezra, standing on an eight-inch ledge of crumbly lime-mud six hundred feet above the lower valley, that bell had been the single fixed point in her imagination for eighteen months. Ever since her younger brother Davren had cinched his second-best pack straps. He tucked his ash walking stick under his arm, and walked north toward the sealed basin of Alderfast without leaving a forwarding address, she had operated on the hard, unbending conviction that only a licensed adventurer’s badge would make her strong enough to follow his tracks.
A village land-mapper from Kilnstep didn’t get past the high mountain checkpoints. A girl who spent her mornings leveling settling trenches around her mother’s pottery kilns was turned back at the customs gate with a stamped refusal and a patronizing caution about the autumn frost. The frontier guards wanted to see parchment backed by a royal guild seal. The silver-washed compass token of a registered mountain scout who had proven they could survive high height, unpredictable squalls, and upright rock without needing a rescue party sent after them. For five hundred days, Kezra had spent every spare hour before dawn running the quarry spoil-heaps behind Kilnstep with forty pounds of damp heavy clay loaded into her pack basket. She had knotted ropes until her cuticles split. She had learned by heart the mountain compass points until she could name the prevailing wind by the taste of the moss on an ash tree.
Now she was thirty paces from the final rope bridge. The sand in the judge’s glass was sliding toward the red line.
She reached down, took a handful of dry chalk dust from her belt pouch, and ground it between her palms until the grey sweat on her skin turned to stiff white paste. The friction brought a dull warmth back into her fingers. It had gone numb from gripping the cold stone.
Beside her on the two-pace-wide shale shelf, Eddic was breathing through his teeth with a dry, whistling rattle.
He was twenty-two, a lean, loose-jointed lowlander from the river towns who had drawn the lottery number that paired him with Kezra at dawn in the muster courtyard. He had spent the first five hours of the climb boasting in a cheerful, rattling stream about the river barges his cousins owned, the bounty money paid for mountain wolves. The silver-trimmed wool cloak he intended to buy the moment the guild clerk stamped his certificate. He had entered the trial not. That was because he loved the high peaks, but because his father’s timber yard was drowning in debt to the lowland river guilds. An adventurer’s pay was the only clean coin that could stop the court guards from seizing their sawmills.
Over the last two hours, as the switchbacks turned from crushed gravel into upright pitches of crumbly layered rock, all the river-town boasting had died away fully. Now his homespun coat was soaked black at the armpits, his lips were cracked and pale. His hands were shaking so hard against the rock face that his iron safety carabiner clicked against the limestone like a loose tooth in a skull.
“How much sand?” Eddic whispered. His voice was thin and dry as corn husks, barely carrying over the ravine draught. “Venn. Look across the bridge. Tell me how much is left in the glass.”
Kezra didn’t look at the sandglass. She knew the glass without looking. The judge, an upright man in an oiled wool tabard of guild white, stood on the opposite platform with his boots planted on dry, dressed granite, a cedar clipboard tucked under one elbow and a brass-plated horn resting on his hip. Beside him, mounted on a three-legged ash stone stand, the sandglass stood two feet high. The fine red quartz grains inside were three-quarters through the narrow brass throat, piling into a shallow cone in the lower bulb. A red thread wound around the waist of the glass marked the final ten-minute warning.
“Enough if we move with our heads instead of our heels,” Kezra said. Her voice came out low and rough, steadying him by refusal of his panic. “Stop looking at the timber bridge, Eddic. Look at the rock two inches above your belt.”
“We have to cross,” he muttered, his chest heaving under his sweat-stained jerkin. “The bell is right there. If someone else hits the bridge ropes before us, the judge will hold us at the support post until the planks clear. They won’t let two pairs on the mid-air cables at once. We’ll run out of sand while we’re standing on the approach.”
“The bridge isn’t going anywhere,” she said, keeping her tone flat. “And panic won’t shorten the ravine.”
Out of an instinct that was older than her ambition—an instinct drilled into her wrists and heels through seven years of pacing foundation lines for Kilnstep’s communal drying sheds—Kezra unhitched her iron-shod survey rod from the side lashings of her pack. It was three arm-lengths of seasoned upland ash, tipped with a four-sided iron shoe and notched at handspan intervals along its length. She stepped forward to the near bridgehead. There, two thick hemp mid-air cables were looped through heavy iron eye-bolts cemented into the rock face.
The bridge was a primitive mid-air span. Two upper handlines of braided hemp, a lower footway of split pine slats strung on iron wire, and two heavy tension cables anchored into the living rock on either rim. It swayed gently in the mountain breeze, sixty feet of open drop yawning directly beneath its center slats.
Kezra tapped the limestone just below the near iron collar with the iron butt of her rod.
Clack.
The sound was not the bright, bell-like ring of solid bedrock. It gave back a dull, gravelly shaking that travelled straight up the ash shaft and into the calloused pad of her index finger.
Kezra tapped again, four inches lower. There, the winter water seeped out of a thin rock seam in the cliff face. A fine dribble of wet, grey mortar dust sifted out of the socket and pattered onto the toe of her boot like dry cornmeal.
“Frost has loosened the collar,” she said, without turning around. “The winter ice swelled behind the lead seal. The eye-bolt is holding against the rock for now. But the stonework around the shank is fractured. When you unclip from the wall line to take the bridge tether, don’t throw your weight forward. Keep three points of contact on the ledge until your backup hook has bitten into the main cable eye. Do you hear me, Eddic?”
“Yeah,” Eddic said, though his eyes were wide and glazed with tiredness. “Yeah. Three points. I heard you.”
Across the wind-swept gap, thirty paces away, the guild judge lifted his brass horn to his lips and blew a short, flat blast that echoed off the grey walls of the ravine like the crack of an axe on dry pine.
“Forty minutes on the sand!” the judge shouted, his voice carrying clearly on the downdraught. “Final approach is open! Testers approaching the bell, clear the bridge support posts before unclipping!”
The horn blast seemed to sever whatever thread of patience Eddic had left. He didn’t wait for Kezra to test the bridge tread. He didn’t look at the wet limestone beneath his boots. His eyes fixed on the heavy bronze bell hanging from its cedar gallows on the opposite rim. He reflected the dull yellow glare of the afternoon sun like a plate of warm butter. He saw his certificate, the guild pay, the release of his father’s timber yard, and the end of six hours of painful, lung-burning labor.
“I’m going,” he said.
“Eddic, wait—”
He stepped out onto the narrowing lip of the shale shelf. He reached for the bridge handline with his left hand while his right hand fumbled at his waist. The spring-loaded gate of his main iron carabiner was stiff with road grit. Instead of easing his hips back against the wall to take the tension off the lanyard, he yanked the clip sideways with a wild wrench of his wrist.
His iron hook cleared the safety line anchored to the rock.
For half a second, he was suspended between the shelf and the bridgehead, connected to nothing at all. He reached out with his backup line, his fingers clawing for the cable ring. But his gaze was still lifted toward the summit bell. He measured the distance to the finish line instead of the ground beneath his feet.
His right boot struck the greasy rim of the shale band where the spring melt had left a skin of green lichen over the stone.
The heel skated out.
There was a sharp, metal screech as his unclipped iron carabiner sparked once against the bare limestone face. Then came a sickening, hollow crunch. Not the sound of stone giving way, but the dry, clear snap of bone yielding under sudden, violent twisting force as his right foot twisted sideways into an open rock fissure, and Eddic’s body pitched toward the drop.