The miners’ path behind Splitflint was not an official road.
It was an old scramble-track cut seventy years ago by prospectors searching the upper dark rock ribs for copper floats and sulfur chimneys. It rose directly from the hostel’s northern back gate door. It climbed through a steep, shadowed gully choked with frost-shattered scree before switchbacking onto the narrow fiery shoulder that hung above the slate rooflines.
Kezra Venn walked with her boots planted firmly on the uphill edges of the shale treads.
On her back, the ash pack-frame rode heavy and unbending, the twelve pounds of iron sounding rods and boundary chisels pressing down through her pelvis with every stride. Her breath came in short, measured puffs that crystal-hardened instantly in the biting cold, coating the wool collar of her coat with a thin crust of white rime. Behind her, the pack mule’s iron shoes clicked softly against the frozen stone, muffled by the rawhide wraps Paxa had laced over each hoof.
At the third switchback, sixty paces above the hostel chimneys, Yseld halted the line with a raised left hand.
They stood on an outcropping of black vesicular dark rock that jutted like an anvil over the notch. Below them, Splitflint hostel looked like a child’s toy dropped into a stone trough. The square courtyard, the whitewashed stable walls. The sixteen-pace stone sorting yard were all visible in the creeping grey dawn, nestled into the crook of the mountain pass.
