Dusk came over the northern shoulders of the Spine not as a gradual fading of light, but as an abrupt, blue-grey shutter closing against the peaks.
Yseld halted the rope twenty paces beyond the shattered stone carving pillar, her hooked staff planted deep into a frozen drift. She looked up at the black shale headwall where the first tongues of hard alpine firn dropped from the snow line, then shook her head.
“We stop here,” Yseld said, her voice cutting through the rising gale. “There’s verglas across the upper ledges. If we try to push through to the second staging camp in the dark, someone will slip a crampon and break an ankle. In this wind, an open fracture means amputation before sunrise.”
Nobody argued. Even Voss, who had been muttering under his breath about reaching a stone shelter before supper, looked at the black ice glazing the upper rocks and stepped off the trail into the lee of a massive limestone outcrop.
The outcrop was a broken spur of dense pale limestone that rose twelve feet above the shale terrace, its western flank carved into a shallow nook by hundreds of years of wind-scoured ice. It was cramped—barely eight paces wide and five paces deep—but the rock wall broke the savage downdraft that poured off the snowfields above.
