Before the first trace of dawn had begun to silver the eastern rim of the Saltglass quarry, Kezra Venn was already climbing the steep, stepped zigzag trail that cut up the face of the western limestone bluff.
The trail had been hacked out of the upright rock by royal quarrymen forty years before, a narrow shelf barely two paces wide that hugged the fractured stone. Every ten paces, a shallow drainage gutter channeled seasonal rainwater away from the cliff face, its bed crusted with brilliant white chalk-stone efflorescence that crunched like coarse rock salt beneath their boot soles. Below them in the dim hollow of the quarry floor, Joric Thane’s nine freight wagons sat in a silent, defensive horseshoe. Their oiled canvas tilts were pale in the starlight, their draft mules huddled together against the biting pre-dawn chill.
Behind Kezra came Fellis Dain and Yseld. Fellis carried a bundle of four peeled ash laths, an iron-headed mallet, a weighted drop-line with a brass turnip-bob. A coil of thirty-two-pace survey cord that had been recalibrated against the rigid ash standard the evening before. His left arm was still bound in Paxa’s wool-and-mustard sling, resting immobile against his ribs. But his right hand held the tools with familiar, easy competence. Yseld brought up the rear. She carried her iron-shod staff and a shuttered horn lantern that threw bobbing pools of amber light across the cold limestone steps, her dark eyes scanning the ridge above for any sign of motion.
