Kezra Venn stood frozen on the lip of the chute, the shaking of that grinding iron pin still tingling in the palm of her hand.
She didn’t gasp. She didn’t swear. In Kilnstep, when a master potter heard the muffled thump of a greenware saggar collapsing inside a sealed kiln at eight hundred degrees, swearing was an indulgence that wasted valuable seconds of air. You either adjusted the dampers right away, or you lost the entire firing. Stone and heat had no ears for anger. They answered only to physical mass, heat, and load-bearing support.
She locked the friction hitch of her safety line around her waist belt, eased her hips back until the hemp took her weight. Then she leaned two feet out over the void to look directly into the socket of the iron support post.
The pin was an inch-thick rod of forged iron, driven six inches into a drilled hole in the limestone face and sealed with molten lead. The standard anchor specified in the country guild manual for mountain trails. But whoever had drilled the hole three summers ago had chosen the easiest spot on the ledge rather than the soundest. The hole passed straight through a thin rock seam where autumn rain collected, froze, and swelled every winter.
The lead plug had been snapped in half by ice pressure. Lead was soft, malleable under summer heat, and utterly incapable of resisting the slow, high-pressure jacking of winter frost. Once moisture pierced the seam between the iron shank and the lead casing, electric-shock rusting had set in. The iron shank was rusted down to the thickness of a thumb, pitted with deep, flaky scabs of red oxide that crumbled at the touch of a fingernail like burnt breadcrust.
She took her sounding rod, reversed it. Then she struck the iron collar with the brass metal ring below the grip.
Ting-clank.
It was a hollow, papery sound, followed by a puff of red dust. The pin was not rooted in solid bedrock. It was floating in a pocket of crushed gravel and rotten rust. It had held during the morning climb only because fifty testers had climbed upward. It pulled along the axis of the rock face. It pressed the pin downward into its leftover lip of stone. A lowering rope pulled horizontally outward toward the valley. Then, the rusted shank would act like a pry-bar, levering the fractured collar right out of the hole.
“One,” she whispered to herself.
She let out four feet of line, lowered herself three paces down the mouth of the chute to where the second support post projected from the rock. Then she struck it with the brass metal ring.
Cluff.
The second pin didn’t even ring. It wobbled like a loose fence post in wet clay. The freeze-thaw cycles of the high crags had pushed the entire stone ledge outward, separating a five-hundred-pound slab of limestone from the main wall by the width of three fingers. The pin was holding only because gravity had not yet decided which way the detached slab would tip. If a dynamic load jerked on that anchor, the whole block would peel off the face like a scabby scab from an unhealed knee. It crushed whatever hung beneath it.
The third pin, four paces lower down the chimney, was bent downward like a drowned reed, its forged eye split along the forge weld where a heavy winter load of snow and ice had jerked it during the spring thaw. The weld had separated by a sixteenth of an inch. Enough to slice through a loaded hemp rope like a dull chisel.
Kezra climbed back up to the shelf using her hands and knees. She hauled her weight on the rock rather than trusting the line. Her face was set in hard, cold lines.
Had she crossed the rope bridge alone to strike the bronze bell, the judge would have logged her success, closed his book. Then it dispatched the four-man evening litter crew after sunset. Those four men—seasoned valley porters carrying a heavy ash stretcher, eighty pounds of tackle. Their own coats—would have arrived at this chute in the dark, with lanterns swinging in the wind and frost forming on their wool mittens. They would have clipped their lowering lines into these exact three pins, hung their stretcher out over the drop. The entire assembly would have zippered out of the cliff in three total snaps. Four valley men and Eddic would have plunged into the darkness before anyone could shout a warning.
In the pottery yards at home, Maud had a saying. A careless builder buries other people’s children. Looking at those three rotten pins, Kezra felt the truth of it down to the marrow of her shinbones. The guild masters in their warm valley offices approved trails on paper, stamped the upkeep vouchers. Then he collected their toll fees. Meanwhile, the rock did what rock always did—heaved under winter ice and shed its skin.
She reached into her coat pocket, pulled out a thick chunk of white survey chalk. Then she walked to the bare rock face above the chute mouth.
In heavy, deliberate strokes, pressing so hard that the chalk snapped in her fingers and left white powder caked beneath her fingernails, she drew a massive X two feet wide directly over the entrance to the chimney. Below it, in the clean, blocky capital letters she used on Kilnstep property deeds, she wrote:
ROTTEN PINS. ICE-SHEARED. DO NOT ANCHOR.
She added an arrow pointing away from the edge, marking the pace distance to the solid limestone bollard forty paces back on the shelf. There, an anchor could be set safely in living rock. She didn’t sign her name. A warning on a cliff was not an essay. It was a building notice meant to stop an unthinking boot.
She turned back to Eddic.
The young man had watched her examine the pins from his seat against the rock wall. He had seen the rust shower down. He had heard the dead, papery ring of the brass metal ring against the rotten iron. The glassy, vacant look in his eyes had been replaced by a quiet, horrified understanding.
“If you had left me,” he whispered, his dry lips barely moving, “the litter crew... They would have used the chute.”
“They would have clipped into the top pin before their boots even left the gravel,” Kezra said. She wiped chalk dust on her trousers. “And all five of you would have ended up at the bottom of the ravine before the lanterns reached the middle shelf. The test judges inspect the summit bridge every spring, but nobody checks the descent anchors until an accident breaks the chain.”
“So how do we get down?”
Kezra turned her back on the chute and looked west toward the setting sun.
Beyond the chalked-off chimney. There, the prescribed guild trail ended, the mountain bent sharply around an overhanging stone support prop of dark, foliated stone. It was a massive wall of rotten black shale, split into millions of thin, fragile plates by thousands of years of frost and wind. No guild land-mapper had ever painted an arrow there. There were no iron pins, no carved footholds, and no handlines. The shale was so brittle that an eagle taking flight from a ledge could send a shower of gravel clattering into the depths.
“We go around the belly,” Kezra said.
“That’s loose shale,” Eddic said, terror edging into his voice again. “My uncle worked the slate quarries down near the river. He said shale has no bottom. It just peels off under your boots like wet paper. If you try to cross a shale apron under load, the whole bank slumps. You’ll trigger a slide that takes the whole face down.”
“Your uncle was talking about quarrying,” Kezra said. She unhooked her coiled sixty-pace lowering line and knotting the end around a natural horn of solid limestone twenty feet back from the edge. “He was talking about blasting rock out of a pit. We’re not quarrying it. We’re going to read it.”
She tied off the anchor with a tensionless hitch, wrapping the hemp five times around the stone horn to let friction take the strain before securing the working end with two half-hitches. She stepped back, tested the line with two hard bounces of her weight. Then she picked up her ash sounding rod.
“Listen to me, Eddic,” she said, kneeling beside his braced leg. “Shale looks like a solid wall, but it’s made of layers. Some layers are rotten as dry leaves, and some layers are hard limestone ribs that were laid down. Just then, the whole mountain was underwater. We’re only going to put our weight on the ribs. You’ll watch my chalk marks, and you’ll not touch anything that isn’t white.”
Eddic looked at her chalk-stained hands, then at the vast black wall of rock falling away into the afternoon shadows. For the first time since his ankle had snapped, the wild panic left his eyes, replaced by the grim, stubborn obedience of a man who realized that his only hope lay in trusting another person’s measurements.
“All right, Venn,” he said softly. “Show me the white marks.”