An hour before sunset on the seventy-second day of their journey, the expedition reached the upper mineworkers’ shelter bench. The terrain here climbed suddenly out of the dark resin forest of Hushwood, emerging onto a broad, wind-scoured shelf of grey limestone perched at the subalpine tree line, five thousand feet above the valley floor.
The bench was a natural deep-rock terrace nearly sixty paces wide, sheltered on the north and east by the sheer, ice-fluted precipices of the Spine. At the western edge of the shelf. There, the limestone dropped away in a series of stepped cliffs, stood a cluster of weathered structures left behind by the old mining company. A low, stout sleeping hut built of heavy squared larch timbers, an underground stone tool cellar with a heavy iron-ringed trapdoor. A cleared working yard paved with crushed shale where ore baskets had once been sorted. Near the sleeping hut, a cold rock spring bubbled out of a cleft in the limestone. It poured into a moss-grown stone trough before spilling over the western rim in a glittering ribbon of spray.
The air here was thin, sharp, and clean, stripped of the heavy resin grease that clogged the lungs in the lower forest. Across the western horizon, the jagged ridges of Blackglass caught the dying orange light of the sun, their fiery crests throwing long, purple shadows across the bitter salt flats of Saltglass fifty miles to the south.
