By early afternoon, the fixed descent line through the upper service stair had been completed. Four heavy iron anchors were seated deep in the hard speckled granite, each rigged with an equalized hemp bridle and checked by Fellis’s careful vocal check. The eighty-pace main line hung down the center of the dark chute like a taut straight-line. Its waxed fibers slid smoothly through the bronze guide-rings without a whisper of sound.
Kezra wiped the sweat from her eyes. She felt the satisfying ache of hard physical labor in her back and shoulders. “The line is secure. We can begin caching the emergency provisions at the bottom.”
“We’ll cache nothing until we have run a live drill,” Paxa Sel’s voice cut through the damp gloom from the upper landing.
The apothecary had climbed down the first twenty steps, her skirts pinned high with brass blanket pins and her heavy medical satchel strapped across her chest. She stood on the intermediate ledge. She looked down at the three of them with the cold, critical eye of a checker who expected disaster and intended to find it before it found them.
“Paxa,” Kezra said, wiping her blackened hands on her trousers, “we have tested every piton with eighty stone of dynamic load. The hemp is fresh, and Fellis dressed every bight himself.”
