The expedition spent the night of Day One Hundred and Thirty-Two in the leeward stone cellar of the Windpit headhouse, huddled around a small charcoal fire bowls beneath a heavy timbered vault that had withstood three hundred years of alpine storms.
At first light on Day One Hundred and Thirty-Three, Kezra Venn walked fifty paces out onto the northern spur of Windpit to inspect the top stone ledge warning cairn they had erected eight days earlier. The rough pillar of piled hard black rock slabs stood exactly as they had left it. Its top marker stone pointed like an iron finger toward the safe southern upkeep cut, while fifty paces beyond, the lethal, overhanging snow top stone ledge curled out into empty space above the thousand-foot eastern drop.
There were no fresh boot-scuffs near the top stone ledge. The plain warning sign had done its work, keeping both man and beast off the false northern continuation.
Kezra turned back to join Yseld and Paxa at the threshold of the Windpit snow saddle.
The saddle was a narrow, six-hundred-pace neck of hard, ice-worn terrain that linked the Windpit massif to the lower southern ridges. On their upward climb eight days ago, the saddle had been packed with dense, wind-crusted firn snow that took the crampons of their boots with a reassuring crunch. But during the past two nights, a sub-zero northern gale had scoured the saddle clear of soft snow, stripping the crest down to a dangerous surface of hard, blue…
