The descent from the eagle’s-nest began at ten o’clock at night, beneath a sky dusted with frosty stars. Across the black void of the Needlehouse gorge, the only sign of human presence was the solitary yellow flicker of the sentry fire bowl on the distant raised stone road tower, three hundred paces to the north.
In the dark, there were no heroic strides and no rapid rappels. Yseld Arken had clipped all four of them into their thirty-fathom climbing line with six-pace spacing loops between each waist harness. Every buckle had been wrapped in oily wool strips. Every brass ring was bound with hemp twining so that iron never touched iron. They moved in total silence, communicating solely through tugs on the braided line. One sharp pull for halt, two pulls for advance, three rapid twitches for danger.
After scrambling down the lower third of the scree rib on heels and palms, Yseld brought them onto the lee-side goat ledge.
It was an ancient, wind-scoured shelf of fractured pale limestone that hugged the sheer western face of the mountain, running forty deep-water lengths between the scree shoulder and the low rear courtyard of the map hall. In daylight, looking down into the four-hundred-foot drop would have turned the stomach of an experienced roofer. In the dark, the drop was merely a vast, cold draught of air rising from the depths of the gorge, smelling of wet shale and frozen lichen.
