The Knife Ridge rose out of the morning fiery haze like the blade of a calcined cleaver set edge-up against the sky.
To the north, the rock fell three hundred arm-lengths in a sheer plunge of fluted dark rock, ending in a shadowed trough of broken scree where frost never thawed and the wind smelled of sulphur and dead scrub. To the south, the slope was barely gentler. A forty-degree chute of scree and slick bitter salt marl plunging toward the blinding white flats of Saltglass, twelve miles distant and shimmering like spilled animal fat under the pale eastern sun.
Between those two abysses lay the path: three to four paces of fractured black stone, shaped into six-sided pillars by ancient cooling and then shattered by thousand-year winters until the crest looked like the uneven tops of a row of rotted teeth.
Kezra Venn kept her right hand on the lead rope and her left thumb hooked into the waxed canvas belt that held her tally cord. Every twenty paces, she paused to allow the grey pack mule to place its iron-shod hooves into the hollow of an intact dark rock cap. The animal moved with ears cocked forward, its nostrils flaring as it tested the cold updraft from the northern trough. It was a sturdy mountain beast that Paxa Sel had leased from a salt freighter two valleys back. But even a seasoned pack animal grew skittish. Just then, the wind hummed through the gap between its ribs and…
