Leaving the sixty-four-pace limestone trap behind them, the four travelers moved two hundred paces west across the barren fiery benches of Southern Blackglass.
The terrain here was fully different from the engineered highway they had just examined. The rock was raw, fractured vesicular dark rock, scoured clean of soil by hundreds of years of scouring mountain winds. Jagged black ridges jutted like ribs from the slope. That forced them to lead the pack mule along narrow contour lines where a single misstep would send gravel sliding into the dry ravines below. The air had warmed considerably as they dropped, losing the crisp bite of the high passes and taking on the dry, stone breath of the bitter salt basin below.
Yseld Arken moved with the deliberate, patient rhythm of a mountain tracker who read stone the way a village clerk read tax registers. She didn’t look at the horizon. She kept her eyes fixed on the rock beneath her boots, pausing every twenty paces to examine the surface of the black ledges. Her ash staff sounded the ground ahead of her. She tested the balance of every fiery slab before she shifted her weight.
Suddenly, near the edge of a broad, level dark rock shelf that overlooked the vast southern descent, the guide stopped. She knelt on one knee, leaned her climbing staff against her shoulder. Then she ran her bare fingertips along the dark rock.
