The draught that rose from the lee-side service stair of the Needlehouse was colder than the open wind. He carried the dank, stone breath of deep fissures that had never seen summer sun. The stairwell had been chiseled through the western shoulder of the hard speckled granite crag three hundred years ago by the early Survey Guild. A narrow, plunging throat barely four feet wide, dropping at a brutal sixty-degree angle through a hundred and twenty paces of sheer rock before debouching onto a hidden scree terrace six hundred feet above the valley floor.
Over hundreds of years of neglect, moisture had seeped into the bedding planes. Half the stone steps had snapped away. That left long slides of slick, greenish shale broken only by jagged spurs of sound rock. To try dropping the stair unassisted with forty-pound packs would have been suicide. To run it in a hurry during an enemy assault without a fixed line would have resulted in four broken bodies piled at the bottom of the couloir.
Fellis Dain sat on an outcropping of dry limestone near the upper entrance of the shaft. He had pulled his woolen coat tight around his shoulders. His left arm was held immobility across his chest in its clean linen sling. In his right hand, he held a short piece of braided hemp. He used it as a pointing baton while Yseld worked ten feet below him on the first anchor shelf.
