In the choking heat of mid-afternoon. Meanwhile, the white glare turned the surface quarry into a blinding fire, the deep underground fissures of the eastern bluff offered a cool, dark refuge.
Kezra Venn and Yseld dropped into the earth not through the thirty-two-pace air-flow chimney, but through an older, half-forgotten service crevice sixty paces east of the collapsed road lip. Accompanying them were two veteran wagon drivers from Joric’s lead wagon. Kroll, carrying a heavy timber-felling axe and a leather bucket of animal fat grease, and Brant, carrying an eighteen-pound iron sledgehammer and four forged steel split-wedges in a canvas sack.
The service crevice was a narrow earth-shaking joint in the grey pale limestone, barely three feet wide, where ancient drainage waters had dissolved a winding natural stairs through the limestone strata. Cold mountain air poured down the fissure from the high plateau. It drew the scent of sun-baked pine needles and bitter salt scrub into the damp stone depths. Every ten paces, natural shelves of crystal-clear white chalk-stone jutted from the walls like jagged shelves of ice. That forced Brant to knock the sharpest spurs away with his hammer to keep their wool coats from tearing.
“Watch your boot heels on the third turn,” Kroll warned. He held his lantern low over a slippery descent of damp shale. “Old Hobb told me the royal road crews used this crevice sixty years ago when the winter gales blew sixty miles an hour across the open terrace. If an avalanche closed…
