The jingle of bronze bells that echoed through the southern defile on the midday of Day 113 sounded to the people of Alderfast like the music of salvation.
Kezra Venn, Adra Pike, and Yseld Arken stood at the newly ramped threshold of the Southern Quarry Cut. She watched a long, disciplined file emerge from the dark, limestone throat of the Coldwork gallery. At the head of the column walked two agile young basin climbers whom Adra had dispatched south on Day 104. Behind them marched fourteen broad-shouldered human pack-carriers and twelve sure-footed mountain mules, their pack-frames laden with bulging oilskin panniers.
It was the first substantial overland resupply to reach Alderfast in eighteen months. The tangible, life-saving fruit of the walking bargain Kezra and Yseld had signed with caravan master Joric Thane in Saltglass on Day 52.
Because the Second Quarter Exchange had replaced the steep, forty-degree scree bench at the gallery mouth with the broad, level forty-pace rock cut, the twelve mules walked straight up the stone-ramped shift without breaking stride. Not a single pannier had to be unloaded at the threshold. Not a single beast stumbled on the four-inch seam that Voss’s masons had packed with crushed gravel.
