Yseld didn’t flinch as the slope groaned beneath her staff.
She took one smooth, fluid step backward, transferring her full weight onto the solid dark rock rib that anchored the southern wall of the chute. Then, she gripped the center of her ash staff with both hands. She reversed the weapon and drove the four-sided iron metal ring straight down into the black scree, two inches from the base of the iron guide stake.
Smash.
The brittle surface crust gave way with the dry, hollow report of shattering clay pot.
A slab of dark, cemented gravel three feet across caved inward, collapsing into a dark, yawning cavity beneath. Through the jagged breach, Kezra looked down into a nightmare of mountain mechanics.
The ground they had been looking at was not a slope of solid scree. It was a suspended crust. A fragile, two-inch shell formed of fiery dust, salt efflorescence, and winter rain that had baked in the mountain sun until it formed a brittle rind over empty space.
And beneath that wafer-thin shell lay three feet of loose, ball-shaped black glass pebbles, fully dry and unconsolidated, resting on a polished forty-degree slip-plane of glass-fused dark rock. The pebbles were round as lead shot and slick as greased beads. The surface crust was broken. Then, the loose black glass gravel began to trickle through the opening in a silent, fluid pour. It hissed down the hidden bedrock like water through a broken water gate.
The gleaming iron guide stake had not been driven into bedrock.
It was barely ten inches deep, its narrowed shank resting entirely within the brittle, hollow crust. A toddler leaning their hand against the iron collar would have pulled it free. A man clipping a safety rope to it would have ripped the entire hillside open.
“Step back, Fellis,” Kezra said. Her voice dropped into the cold, level register of a land-mapper assessing a collapsed cellar. “Don’t bring your weight off the limestone.”
She unhitched her iron sounding rod and crept to the edge of the dark rock rib. That kept three points of contact on the living rock. She extended the four-foot ash shaft out over the chute. She let the iron shoe tap lightly against the surface crust five paces higher up the slope.
Tock.
The sound returned instantly through the wood: thin, drum-like, and fully hollow.
She tapped again, three paces to the left, then four paces higher. The sound signed name was terrifyingly uniform. The hollow slip-plane didn’t end at the first stake. It ran sixty paces straight up the throat of the chute, right to the narrow constriction where the black spires pinched together against the sky.
“It’s a false floor,” Kezra said, her knuckles tightening around the ash rod. “The whole chute is a hanging slide. A single unburdened scout might scamper across the crust if they moved fast enough and didn’t stop to breathe. But the moment four travelers with heavy packs and an iron-shod mule put their weight on that slope, the crust would shear along the rock layer seam.”
“And the slide?” Fellis asked, his voice strained as he stared down into the black void beneath Yseld’s boots.
“The loose gravel acts like ball bearings on a greased chute,” Kezra replied. “The entire surface slab—sixty paces of rock, stakes, and whatever was standing on them—would peel away in five seconds and drop straight over the lower cliffs into the gorge. You wouldn’t even leave an echo behind.”
Fellis wiped a film of cold sweat from his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He stared at the long, neat line of iron pins climbing the deadly slope.
“Who would do that?” he whispered. “Why forge twelve iron stakes, haul them three days into the high combs, and hammer them into a death trap? A land-mapper doesn’t plant pins where there’s no bottom.”
“A land-mapper didn’t plant them,” Yseld said.
The trail master reached out with her hooked staff, snagged the collar of the loosened guide stake, and pulled. The three-foot iron pin slid out of the brittle crust with sickening ease. That brought a small cascade of dry black gravel with it.
Yseld caught the heavy metal shank in her left hand and turned it in the midday sun.
The stake was beautifully made. The iron was dense, charcoal-smelted stock, square in cross-section with beveled edges, the metal showing the clean, rhythmic hammer-marks of a high-production water forge. On the flat facet just beneath the collar, struck deep into the metal by an unbending steel die, was a square maker’s mark. A stylized tower enclosed within a spiked chevron.
Yseld ran her scarred thumb across the mark, her mouth flattening into a thin, bitter line that made her look ten years older.
“Cairn Host supply stock,” Yseld said. Her tone was so quiet it seemed to vanish into the mountain wind. But it carried an edge of cold fury that made Fellis stiffen. “Forged at the eastern arsenals in Oakhaven. They don’t sell this iron to sheep farmers or road guilds. It’s issued to guard post engineers and patrol captains.”
“The Host?” Kezra asked, looking from the iron pin to the silent ridges above. “Why would the Cairn Host mark a false trail over Blackglass?”
“Because an open pass through these combs is worth ten thousand silver thalers in customs duties,” Yseld said. She tossed the heavy iron stake onto the solid limestone steps behind them, where it struck with a flat, heavy clang. “And because if you don’t want merchants or independent land-mappers wandering through your private toll country, you don’t post a company of soldiers on an exposed ridge where everyone can see them. You leave a neat, official-looking road marker that steers them straight into an avalanche.”
“And if someone survives the fall?” Fellis asked.
“Nobody survives four hundred feet onto fiery dark rock,” Paxa said from the edge of the limestone treads. The physician had climbed up from the lower camp to join them. Her linen apron was tied snug over her woolen coat, her grey eyes glittering with cold and exact distaste. “The human skull fractures under eighty pounds of sudden pressure. A four-hundred-foot tumble through sixty tons of shifting clinker turns bone into meal. The crows wouldn’t even have to pick the meat. The stones would do the butchering.”
Yseld walked five paces along the solid dark rock rib, checking the second and third iron stakes with her staff. Both were matching: seated shallowly in the hollow crust, fully empty of foundation, ready to collapse at the first serious load.
With deliberate, systematic violence, the trail master hooked each stake in turn, hauled them out of the slope. Then they flung them down onto the solid rock of the spur.
“Never leave an enemy’s bait in the trap,” Yseld muttered. She watched the third iron pin tumble to the limestone. “Some poor fool with a pack of dry wool might come climbing up from the valley next month, see those shiny heads, and trust them with his neck.”
“Then where does the real road go?” Fellis asked, looking at the sheer, upright walls of black dark rock that hemmed in the spur on both sides. “If the saddle is a scarp. The chute is a slide, how did Davren get over this ridge?”
Kezra looked back at the limestone riser beneath the cairn.
The three-inch split triangle gleamed pale in the midday light. Davren had stood here. He had examined the chute. He had probably tapped the crust with his sounding rod, heard the drum-like echo of the hollow void. Then he recognized the trap for what it was. And instead of climbing blindly into the slide, he had lifted his chisel, left the top stroke shortened to warn anyone who followed. Then he searched for another way.
“He didn’t take the chute,” Kezra said. “He was too good a land-mapper to walk on a drum-head.”
“Then he went around,” Yseld said.
The trail master turned her back on the false chute and walked south along the narrow shelf of living dark rock, her eyes scanning the lower contour of the cliff where the dark rock plunged toward the gorge. The wind whistled through the jagged flutes of the columnar dark rock, sounding like the pipes of an empty organ.
Fifty paces past the displaced cairn. There, the shelf pinched out against an upright stone support prop of dark, six-sided stone, Yseld suddenly dropped onto her haunches.
She reached out with a bare hand, touching the edge of a narrow, upright fissure in the rock wall. A steep, chimney-like crack barely two paces wide that zig-zagged upward through the heart of the dark rock scarp.
“Look here,” Yseld called.
Kezra scrambled along the shelf to join her, keeping her back pressed firmly against the solid cliff face.
Along the outer corner of the rock chimney, three feet above the ground, the dark fiery dark rock was worn fully smooth. The sharp crystal-clear facets had been buffed away. That left a pale, greasy sheen that ran continuously up the stone wall like a polished handrail.
“What’s that?” Kezra asked, touching the polished surface. It felt slick, almost waxy beneath her fingertips.
“Goats,” Yseld said, a faint, dry smile touching the corners of her weathered eyes for the first time that day. “Mountain goats have used this chimney since the freeze. When they scramble up the crack, their bellies and flanks rub against this outer corner. Forty ages of goat grease, Venn. It doesn’t look like a royal highway, and it won’t take a four-horse wagon. But every single foot of it’s living, solid bedrock.”