Honesty in the mountains carried a heavy price in hours and calluses.
Rejecting the false scree chute meant turning their backs on what looked, to an untrained eye, like a twenty-minute scramble to the ridge. In its place, the goat chimney demanded half a day of grinding, unglamorous labor. The kind of slow, deliberate progress that left fingernails split to the quick and wool coats sodden with sweat despite the freezing mountain wind.
The first fifty paces along the southern contour were easy enough. The rock shelf was narrow, rarely wider than two paces. But the dark stone ribs beneath their boots were rooted deep into the mountain’s core. Where the scree slope had been a dangerous ocean of sliding clinker, this rock was solid as an anvil, textured with coarse cooling crusts that gave their rawhide-shod boots an unbending purchase.
Then the shelf ended at the base of the chimney.
The chimney was an upright fault in the cliff wall, five arm-lengths wide at the floor and narrowing to barely three arm-lengths at the shoulder. The walls were six-sided columns of dark, glassy dark rock, stacked like bundles of stone-hard cedar logs. He rose eighty feet to an upper shelf. The floor of the fissure was a row of giant stone steps, each three to four feet high, scoured clean of loose debris by hundreds of years of meltwater and the passage of wild sheep.
“Barnaby won’t take this with the wicker panniers,” Fellis said. He looked up the narrow throat of the rock with a practical eye. “The side baskets are four feet across. If he wedges them between those columns halfway up, he’ll panic, kick backward, and drop straight into the wash.”
“Then we strip the packs,” Yseld said without breaking stride. “Fellis, take the haul line. Venn, anchor the base.”
They worked with the rapid, wordless smooth speed of people who knew that mountain light had no patience for pause.
While Paxa gentled the mule with handfuls of dry barley grain, Kezra and Fellis unbuckled the heavy willow-wicker panniers from the pack saddle. The medicine chests, the heavy iron survey pins, the rolls of spare sailcloth, and the canvas tent were bundled into three compact packages wrapped in oiled tarpaulin and lashed tight with hemp line.
Fellis uncoiled sixty feet of their braided climbing rope, tied an alpine knot around his waist. Then they began the ascent of the first twenty-foot chimney pitch.
He moved with surprising grace for a broad-shouldered man burdened with heavy wool and leather. His boots found tiny, level cooling cracks in the dark rock. His thick fingers locked onto the waxy corners where the goats had buffed the stone smooth. Within five minutes, he had topped out on an intermediate rock shelf twenty feet above them, looping the haul line around a massive, four-sided dark rock horn that jutted from the cliff face.
“Line is anchored!” Fellis bellowed down through the cleft, his voice echoing off the six-sided walls. “Haul away!”
Kezra stepped to the base of the rope, spitting on her leather-mittened palms.
She took the running end of the hemp line, braced her heels against the bottom stone tread, and hauled. One by one, the heavy seventy-pound bundles were lifted from the ground, swinging clear of the jagged column corners as Paxa steadied the lower guide line from below.
With every pull, the coarse hemp bit through Kezra’s leather mitts. It sent a dull, burning ache through the muscles of her shoulders and forearms. Yet beneath the physical fatigue, her mind remained sharply attuned to her land-mapper’s discipline.
Every time she shifted her boots on the rock shelf, she checked her footing against the internal thread of her nonstop walked route. In her bonded ledger, the line from Kilnstep parish datum remained unbroken. Twenty-four miles and three furlongs of physically measured, walked terrain. If she let herself be hauled up by a rope while suspended in midair, the nonstop thread of her survey would uncouple, invalidating her route record for the central registries. A plot map maker didn’t fly. She walked, stepped, and climbed with her boots anchored to the crust of the world.
When the last bundle was safely landed on Fellis’s shelf, it was Barnaby’s turn.
The pack mule was a mountain-bred beast. But the sheer, upright throat of the chimney made his nostrils flare with nervous, whistling snorts. He planted his four rawhide-shod hooves against the stone and refused to budge, his ears flattened back against his skull.
“Don’t pull the headstall, Fellis,” Kezra called up. “If he fights the bit, he’ll rear.”
She stepped to the animal’s flank, resting her shoulder against his broad, muscular barrel. Paxa took the lead rein, speaking in a low, rhythmic hum. A soothing, repetitive lowlander wagon chant that had calmed cart horses through a hundred market fairs.
“Come on, Barnaby,” Kezra murmured, her palm pressing firmly against the warm, trembling hide. “One step. Solid rock beneath your shoes. Nothing is moving here.”
Fellis hauled gently on the halter line from above, keeping a steady, non-threatening tension. Paxa offered a chunk of dried apple from her pocket.
The mule stretched his neck out, sniffed the sweet fruit, and lifted his near forefoot. The rawhide overshoe struck the first dark rock tread with a firm, dull thud. Finding the stone unbending, the animal gathered his powerful hindquarters and lunged upward, scrambling up the first rock step with a sharp clatter of bone and leather.
Ten minutes of coordinated coaxing, lifting, and bracing brought the mule to the intermediate ledge. There, he stood with his sides heaving. But his legs sound and uninjured.
“Good beast,” Fellis panted, wiping grease and sweat from his chin. “Better than half the apprentices at the guild hall.”
While they paused on the ledge to catch their breath before tackling the second pitch, Kezra pulled a stick of thick yellow marking chalk from her waist pouch.
She knelt beside the narrow crack where their hands had found purchase during the climb. On the dark, glassy dark rock, she drew three neat, distinct level bars across the best handhold. She was followed by a level notch above the footing shelf.
Fellis watched her, raising an eyebrow. “What’s that for? We aren’t in a classroom, Kezra. Nobody is grading your chalk marks.”
“We’re entering an unknown crest,” Kezra said, without looking up as she capped the chalk. “Yseld showed us that the Cairn Host is setting traps on this ridge. If we run into an armed patrol at the pass. Or if a sudden autumn blizzard blows off the Spine before we reach the hostel, we might have to retreat down this chimney in total darkness.”
Fellis blinked, looking down into the narrow, shadowy cleft they had just climbed.
“In daylight, you can pick your holds,” Kezra continued, her voice level and pragmatic. “In the dark, with rain turning this goat grease slick as lye soap, you won’t remember which column is solid and which flake will snap under your fingers. These marks will tell our hands where the stone holds.”
Yseld, who was coiling the spare hemp line, looked down at the yellow chalk marks and gave a single, approving grunt.
“The girl thinks like a scout,” Yseld said to Paxa. “Most young land-mappers think about how they’re going to march into town with their trumpets blowing. A good land-mapper thinks about how they’re going to crawl home with a broken leg without losing their map.”
“Don’t encourage her to plan on broken legs,” Paxa snapped back, though she reached into her pocket and handed Kezra a piece of dried ginger root to chew for the climb. “My splint wood is heavy enough as it’s.”
The second half of the chimney was steeper. But the rock opened into a series of broad, natural benches where the dark rock columns had snapped horizontally along their cooling joints. Working in the same steady pace—hauling the gear, coaxing the mule, and planting their boots on living rock—they climbed the leftover forty feet of the fissure.
By late afternoon, the upright walls of the chimney fell away to either side.
Kezra pulled herself up over the final rock lip. Her forearms shook with tiredness, and stepped out onto a broad, level expanse of stone.
She stood motionless, the freezing mountain wind washing over her face, clearing the hot sweat from her temples.
They had topped out four hundred feet above the spur and the displaced cairn. Far below them to the north, the false scree chute looked like nothing more than a narrow, grey pencil line cutting through the cliffs. A thread of dangerous debris flanked by the bright, evil glint of the pulled iron pins.
Here, however, the mountain offered a fully different face.
Tucked beneath a towering, overhanging wall of dark columnar dark rock lay an amazing, natural stone shelf. It stretched sixty paces north to south, sheltered from the howling eastern gales by a natural low roof wall of living rock. The floor of the shelf was composed of massive, six-sided dark rock pavers, fitted together by fiery cooling as tightly as the dressed stone floor of a cathedral nave, fully level and swept clean of loose debris by the wind.
Barnaby scrambled onto the shelf behind her, his rawhide-shod hooves making a firm, hollow sound on the stone. He lowered his head, shook his entire body until his leather harness jingled like a tambourine. Then he blew a long, contented snort of mountain air.
Kezra walked to the center of the shelf, pacing the width with deliberate strides.
One, two, three, four, five paces wide.
Five paces of solid, unbending rock, sheltered from the elements, fully stable, and belonging to the third ecology of her survey journey.