The wind off the high Spine didn’t blow in gusts. It pressed against the body with the steady, cold weight of deep river water.
Kezra Venn stood on the narrow gravel terrace at the western foot of the Knife Ridge, leaning her chest into the gale to keep the forty-four pounds on her pack-frame from pulling her heels off the stone. Her fingers, tucked inside her greased wool mittens, gripped the seasoned ash shaft of her survey rod until the wood creaked against her palms.
Beneath her boots, the dark rock columns hummed.
It wasn’t a sound that could be heard with the ears. It was a low-hum shaking that rose through the soles of her trail boots, through her ankle joints and shin bones. It settled deep into her pelvis. The gale was blowing across the fractured caps of a thousand six-sided dark rock pillars, playing the mountain crest like the reeds of a giant, underground organ.
She looked back over her left shoulder.
Behind them, falling away to the south and west, lay thirty miles of walked mountain.
Nine days ago, she had stood on the whitewashed doorstep of her mother’s kiln cottage in Kilnstep. She watched the morning mist rise from the lime pits. Meanwhile, her brother Davren’s ash walking stick remained a distant, unresolved mystery in the far north. Since that sunrise, every yard of distance had been paid for in physical toil and cold iron.
