Before she touched a single strand of rope, Kezra Venn knelt beside Eddic on the cold shale and pulled two flat oak survey slats from the side sheath of her pack frame.
They were four inches wide, half a finger thick. Then they notched at handspan intervals along their edges. Spares she had brought from Kilnstep to stake out corner benchmarks if the test judges had demanded a technical three-point sighting survey on the summit platform. The wood was straight-grained upland white oak, cut from the southern slopes above the clay pits and seasoned for two summers inside the warm, dry air of her mother’s pottery drying sheds. It had no knots, no grain twist. It was hard enough to turn the edge of a cheap knife. In the pottery village, wood that could survive the humidity changes around a cooling kiln without warping was valued above pine or fir. It was the same timber used for wheel-spokes and kiln-door lintels.
She took her horn-handled work knife, slit the heavy wool lining from the underside of her coat tails. Then she sliced the fabric into four broad, overlapping strips. The wool was coarse and thick, dyed with cheap walnut husk. It still carried the faint, comforting smell of domestic peat smoke.
“This is going to hurt, Eddic,” she said, her voice fully empty of false comfort. “Keep your teeth together and scream into your sleeve if you need to, but don’t kick. If you kick, you’ll tear the skin over the bone.”
“I know,” Eddic wheezed, his lips pale against his grime-streaked face. “Do it. Just do it.”
She didn’t wait for him to build up courage. In the kilns, when hot embers fell into the kindling bin, pause only gave the fire time to catch. Speed was the only mercy she had to offer.
She set the first oak slat along the inner curve of his lower leg, aligning the smooth wood from the base of his knee down past the swollen ankle bone. Then she set the second slat along the outer calf. She wrapped the torn wool strips around the wood in tight, even layers to pad the inflamed skin, then unbuckled two heavy leather work straps from her bedroll. Threading the tongues through the brass buckles, she cinched the straps until the fractured bone was locked into a rigid, unbending wooden box.
Eddic’s head snapped back against the limestone wall with a muffled scream that died in his throat. His entire body arched off the stone, muscles corded like iron cables, before he slumped forward onto his elbows. He gasped for breath while thick drops of cold sweat dripped from the tip of his nose onto the shale. His eyes rolled up toward the rim of the cliff, white and unseeing, then fluttered back into focus.
“Toes,” Kezra demanded, leaning down and tapping his bare big toe firmly with her thumbnail. “Can you feel that?”
“Yes,” he whispered, shivering wildly. “Cold. Sharp. Feels like needles.”
“Good. The breath flow is intact. Leave the buckles alone. If you loosen them, the bone will grind on the descent. You’ll pass out before we reach the middle shelf. When you feel a throb, breathe through your nose.”
Across the deep gap, the bronze bell chimed again.
Dong.
Another tester, a young woman with braided hair and an ornate dress sword swinging at her hip, struck the bronze rim with the wooden mallet and raised both fists toward the grey afternoon sky with a triumphant yell that echoed off the cliffs. On the watching deck, the senior judge made a neat, decisive stroke on his clipboard, dipped his quill into an inkwell held by an orderly, and glanced once across the ravine toward Kezra. His gaze stayed on her knotted rope and the wooden splint for two seconds, impassive and skilled, before he turned back to the ledger. He didn’t shout or wave. Under guild regulations, a tester who refused the solo summit option had chosen her own course. What happened on her side of the gorge was no longer a check matter, but a private emergency.
Kezra uncoiled her twenty-pace hemp check line and laid it out in clean, parallel bights across the shale.
Twenty paces—barely fifty feet. If she tried to lower Eddic down the prescribed ascent chimney that they had scrambled up that morning, fifty feet of rope would leave him dangling in empty space sixty paces above the boulder talus at the foot of the gorge. The rock wall directly below them was an unbroken apron of crumbly, rotten shale that dropped sheer into the lower gorge without a single intermediate ledge wide enough for a man to sit on.
She turned to Eddic’s pack, unclipped his check coil, and shook it out beside her own.
Two ropes. Forty paces total. That was enough to reach the lower talus terrace if she found an honest slanted route across the rock face.
She took the working ends of both lines, checked them inch by inch for stone-bruises, flattened cores, or frayed strands. Then she joined them with a double-tucked figure-eight bend. She didn’t use a simple square knot or a traveler’s sheet bend. Those were lowland knots, good enough for tying a timber raft to a mooring post in calm water. But prone to jamming under tension or rolling over their own collars when subjected to the dynamic shock of an uneven human load.
In Kilnstep, where heavy timber hoists lifted three-ton blocks of limestone out of the extraction pits, the older riggers taught that a knot was only as good as its shape. A poorly chosen bend tightened under load until the fibers crushed each other from within, cutting the line’s working limit by half. The double figure-eight was an honest, balanced bend. It preserved eighty percent of the line’s breaking strength, it couldn’t slip under cyclical loading. It would untie cleanly even after bearing the combined weight of two people down a cliff face.
She left four full handspans of tail on each end of the knot, dressed the crossings with her thumbs until every strand lay parallel without a single twist. Then she seated the bend by bracing her boot against the rock and hauling back with her full weight until the hemp groaned. Then she locked into a hard, compact walnut.
“What are you doing?” Eddic murmured, his voice slurred as the shock deepened.
“Rigging a lowering bridle,” she said.
She took the spare tail of his rope, passed it twice around his thighs and once around his chest beneath the armpits, and tied it off with a bowline on a bight, seating the knot over his chest bone. It created a makeshift bosun’s chair that would keep his spine upright and prevent his pack from tipping his head down if the pain knocked him unconscious during the lower.
“We can’t go down the western gully,” Eddic muttered, squinting toward the eastern gully where the testers had climbed. “The chimney... The chimney has the iron pins. The test judges drove them in with sledges. Everyone climbs the chimney. It’s the chosen route.”
Kezra pointed the iron shoe of her sounding rod at the mouth of the chimney sixty paces below them.
In the morning, the chimney had been a shadow-filled slot of cold, frozen shale, where tester boots could find purchase on the thin crust of frost. Now, under the afternoon sun, the snowfield on the upper peak was melting rapidly. A steady, grey trickle of mud and slurry was pouring down the throat of the chimney. That turned the dark rock into an upright slide of greased slate.
“The chimney is a sewer,” Kezra said. “And the iron pins were driven three summers ago. Did you look at the top support post when we passed it this morning?”
“I... I was trying to keep up with you,” he admitted, looking down at his braced leg. “I didn’t look at anything except your boots.”
“The top pin was bent outward two inches,” she said, her fingers working swiftly to secure the chest sling. “The rock around the lead collar was spalled off by winter ice. It took your weight when you pulled up on it this morning because you were pulling down-slope, parallel to the shank. That’s pure shear pushback. If we hang two bodies from it on a lowering line, we’ll be pulling outward at right angles to the hole. The leverage will be three times higher.”
She tied off the chest sling, checked the tail knot, and pulled Eddic’s pack straps snug so the load wouldn’t shift. Just then, he leaned back.
“A climber looks at a pin and sees a handhold,” she added. She stood up and testing the balance of her ash rod. “A land-mapper looks at a pin and asks what holds the rock that holds the pin. If the rock is rotten, the finest iron in the realm is just a very expensive nail waiting to fall out.”
She didn’t wait to argue. She unhitched her main safety line, walked to the lip where the chimney began. Then she leaned out on her safety tether to test the top support post before committing Eddic’s life to an assumption.
She reached out with her sounding rod and hooked the curved iron claw under the collar of the top pin.
She gave a single, firm tug.
The iron support post shifted half a thumb’s width out of its stone socket with a dry, grinding crunch, with a shower of orange rust and powdered limestone that vanished silently into the mist below.