Chapter 716: Walking Down With Empty Hands

The steep cobbled ramp dropping from Stonewake’s southern turnpike gate to the floor of the Alderfast basin was paved with rough, frost-heaved blocks of local dark grey rock. Kezra Venn walked down the descent with her sounding rod tucked under her left arm, her boots finding the dry patches between the rime-slick stones with the unrushed, steady beat of a hill walker who knew that running on frozen scree broke ankles faster than enemy arrows. The descent from the citadel was an exercise in tactile memory. Every switchback on this military road had been carved out of the living mountainside by ages of guard post engineers, who had blasted through the dark grey rock ribs and built up heavy dry-stone retaining cribs to keep the track from slipping into the ravine below. Kezra watched the way Yseld handled her climbing staff. The guide didn’t merely plant the iron point, but dragged the curved hook lightly along the inner rock face. It felt for frost-heaves and loose shale thin wedges that could peel away under a loaded wheel. In her mind, Kezra was already calculating the physical mass of the road. This turnpike was not an abstract line on a map. It was twenty thousand tons of dressed stone, gravel fill, and iron-braced timbers that connected the isolated mountain castle to the valley floor. If Stonewake Citadel were ever relocated, this ramp would be cut at the boundary line. That left an eight-hundred-foot upright cliff where a road had run for…

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