The trapped court of the Needlehouse was filled with the thin, grey light of false dawn. Frost covered the flat stone slabs like a dusting of coarse sea salt, crunching softly beneath Kezra’s moccasin-lined boots. She stepped through the doorframe. Every motion had to be calculated. A careless drag of a heel would leave a black furrow in the white frost that even an apprentice scout could read from fifty paces away.
To her right, Yseld Arken moved with the fluid, ghost-like economy of a wolf crossing frozen tundra. She carried the rusted iron mason’s pick in her left hand and a spare winter boot in her right.
“Walk only on the dry stone where the roof overhang sheltered the flags from the hoarfrost,” Yseld whispered. She pointed with the pick toward the dark, gaping portal of the northern gallery.
The northern gallery had once been the proud entrance avenue of the waystation, a vaulted carriage road six yards wide designed to receive freight wagons from the northern mining towns. Now, twenty paces inside the portal, the vaulted roof had snapped away during an ancient earthquake, dumping a titanic wedge of shattered hard speckled granite boulders and powdered limestone across the passage. The rubble choke reached from the floor to the keystone, sealed tight by three hundred years of tightly packed gravel and hardened wash. To anyone standing on the outside looking into the gloomy inside, however, the dark void appeared to continue indefinitely into the heart of the mountain.
