Kezra Venn didn’t think about the bronze summit bell, the forty minutes of sand leftover in the guild glass, or the white-tabarded judge watching from across the ravine.
She dropped her ash sounding rod, lunged forward with her boots skidding on the loose gravel. Then she slammed her left shoulder hard into an inward-sloping rib of solid limestone. The impact drove the breath out of her lungs in a sharp grunt. But the living rock gave her a purchase. She drove her right arm forward into the empty air, fingers clawing through the cold wind. Then she caught the woven hemp webbing of Eddic’s pack harness just below the left shoulder buckle.
The jerk of his falling weight nearly ripped her collarbone from its socket.
Eddic shrieked, a high, ragged sound that was cut off as his torso slammed against the outer edge of the shale shelf. He swung out over the six-hundred-foot drop, his left leg kicking wildly in empty air. Meanwhile, his right foot remained wedged in the narrow crevice where the limestone tooth had caught his boot. His fingers clawed wildly at the upright rock face. That left red smears of blood from torn fingernails across the cold stone. But there was no purchase on the ice-worn marl.
“Hold!” Kezra shouted through clenched teeth. Her knuckles turned white around the coarse hemp straps. “Stop kicking! Stop moving, damn you! You’re tearing the webbing!”
The canvas harness was old, issued from the guild’s backup training depot in the valley. The stitching along the shoulder pad was already groaning under the sudden dynamic load. If that seam pulled through, Eddic would drop out of his straps like a stone from a split sling.
Kezra dug her right boot heel into a two-inch depression in the shelf, braced her thigh against the limestone horn. Then she threw her entire weight backward. It was the same leverage she had used a hundred times to right overturned clay carts in the Kilnstep pits—lowering her balance point. She locked her spine. Then she pulled with the big muscles of her hips and legs rather than her arms. In the pottery yards, when a sixty-gallon slurry vat tipped on an uneven plank, you didn’t pull upward with your shoulders. You wedged your heel behind an oak sleeper, let your weight do the work. Then he trusted the friction of the earth to hold your boots.
With a sustained, burning heave that tore the skin off her palms through her wool mitts, she hauled his pack frame upward until his ribs caught the lip of the ledge.
She grabbed the heavy homespun collar of his coat, dragged him three feet back from the edge into the shelter of the rock wall, and collapsed beside him on the shale, her chest heaving as if she had run five miles through soft river sand. Her vision swam with bright sparks, and her throat burned with the raw scrape of cold mountain air.
Eddic lay on his back, his face the color of wet parchment. A cold, greasy sheen of shock sweat stood out across his forehead and upper lip. His breath came in rapid, shallow wheezes that whistled in his throat like wind through a cracked shutter. His hands fluttered over his chest, trembling so wildly that he couldn’t even close his fingers into fists.
“My leg,” he gasped, his voice cracking into a dry, broken whisper. “Venn... My leg. It caught. It caught in the tooth.”
Kezra knelt beside him on the cold stone. She pulled her horn-handled work knife from her belt and sliced through the sodden leather laces of his right boot from top to toe. When she pulled the tongue back, she didn’t need a doctor’s training to read the damage.
The right ankle had folded outward at an unnatural, sickening angle. Above the joint, the lower end of the calf bone bulged against the pale skin like a buried tent peg, threatening to punch through the surface with every reflex burst of his calf muscle. The joint was already swelling rapidly, purple and dark with internal bleeding. It spread heat that she could feel through the cold mountain air against her bare knuckles.
She touched his pulse at the main neck blood vessel beneath his jaw. It was racing, thin and thready, galloping at twice the normal rhythm. His pupils were dilated until the dark centers almost swallowed the grey iris. His skin felt clammy and freezing beneath the film of sweat. He was sliding straight into acute neurogenic shock—the body’s gut, total retreat from unbearable trauma.
Across the ravine, the judge’s voice came booming through his brass horn, amplified by the natural acoustics of the gorge.
“Shelf tester! State your situation!”
Kezra stood up, keeping her back pressed flat against the rock face to steady her shaking knees. Then she cupped her hands around her mouth.
“Fracture!” she shouted across the deep gap, her voice hoarse from limestone dust. “Closed fracture of the lower right leg! Partner can’t bear weight! Ankle joint compromised!”
The judge lowered his horn, checked the sandglass on his cedar table, and spoke again. His words were crisp, procedural, and fully empty of malice. He was a skilled functionary of the adventurer guild. That man had presided over twenty seasons of spring examinations. He knew the rule book by heart.
“Under Article Seven of the Regional Trial Code, a tester whose assigned partner suffers a disabling injury during the final approach is allowed to secure the casualty to the shelf support posts and proceed alone across the bridge. The litter crew will climb from the lower valley station after sunset. If you cross within the sand window, your trial will be recorded as complete!”
Eddic heard the ruling. He propped himself up on his elbows with a painful groan. It trembled wildly from the waist up as the cold mountain draught began to bite through his sweat-soaked clothing. His teeth were chattering with a rapid, rhythmic click that sounded like dice rattling in a leather cup.
“Go,” he croaked. He looked up at her with eyes that were wide and glassy with pain. “Venn... Go on. You heard him. You can finish alone. You’re thirty paces from the planks. Just... Just clip me to the iron bolt and go hit the bell.”
He repeated it twice more, his voice rising in pitch until it was almost a plea: “Go on. Go on. Don’t fail because of me. I’m fine right here. I’ll just wait for the litter. My family... My father’s yard... If I don’t get the pay, that’s my problem. But you trained for this. Don’t throw it away.”
Kezra looked across the ravine.
Thirty paces away, across the swaying hemp cables of the mid-air bridge, the bronze bell gleamed in the late sun. A young man from the northern valleys was standing by the gallows. He wiped his brow with a silk handkerchief. Meanwhile, the assistant clerk stamped his certificate with red wax. Behind him, the path down the eastern slope was a wide, gentle mule track paved with crushed granite, leading down to the festival tents, the roasted meats, and the congratulations of the guild masters.
If she crossed the bridge now, she would strike the bell. Her name would be written in the great roll of approved scouts. She would have the stamped parchment that opened the mountain customs posts. She would have the legal right to hire porters, to purchase expedition provisions at guild rates, and to demand entry into the frontier passes where Davren had disappeared eighteen months ago. For five hundred days, that single piece of parchment had been her entire reason for rising before dawn and running the clay spoil-heaps until her lungs bled.
Then she looked down at Eddic.
The shadow of the western ridge was already creeping up the shale wall. That turned the rock from pale gold to the color of wet slate. The wind through the ravine was picking up its evening teeth. It carried the sharp, freezing chill of the high snowfields. A man in acute shock, with his clothes soaked through and his blood pooling in an injured limb, wouldn’t last three hours on an exposed stone shelf in an alpine wind.
Kezra had seen what exposure did to injured quarrymen in Kilnstep. A body went into shock. Then, the heart pulled the blood away from the skin and limbs to keep the core alive. The fingers turned white, the shivering stopped, and within two hours a man was so dull and confused that he would untie his own coat or try to crawl away in the dark.
By the time the litter crew finished their supper in the valley, lit their animal fat lanterns. Then they hauled their heavy pine stretcher up the prescribed switchbacks, the heat on this shelf would drop below freezing. Eddic would be stiff with freezing sickness. Or delirious enough from the pain to roll off the two-pace ledge into the boulders six hundred feet below.
Leaving him anchored to a frost-cracked iron support post was not a rescue plan. It was an office permission to let a man die quietly so long as the paperwork remained tidy. The guild would record it as an unfortunate field casualty, commend Kezra for her grit under pressure, and award her the bronze token. And she would carry that bronze token into the Spine knowing that she had bought her brother’s search with another family’s son.
Kezra reached down, unbuckled the main flap of her pack. Then she pulled out her coiled twenty-pace length of three-strand hemp check rope.
“Shut up, Eddic,” she said. Her voice dropped into the flat, even register she used when a kiln wall was bulging. “Save your breath. Neither of us is sleeping on this shelf tonight.”