Two hours before the first pale grease of dawn touched the eastern crags, the cold above Alderfast had hardened until the air tasted of iron and powdered stone.
Kezra Venn stood on the packed gravel staging ramp behind the northern defensive barrier, checking the buckle tongues on her survey harness with stiff, gloved fingers. Beside her, Yseld Arken held a hooded horn lantern close to the gravel, its shutter cracked just enough to spill an amber slit across the frozen treads. Paxa Sel was already adjusting the woolen muffler wrapped twice around her throat, her breath pluming white and immediate, while nineteen-year-old Fellis Dain leaned his shoulder against the dressed stone breastwork, his braced left arm held securely against his ribs inside his sheepskin vest.
Before them rose the massive, two-hundred-and-fifty-six-pace stone barrier Kezra had set across the pass road twenty-eight days earlier. It was a Quarter-scale prism, sixteen paces high and thirty-two paces thick at the battered footing, quarried from the high metamorphic shelf of the eastern spur and dropped flush into the road cut on Day One Hundred and Ten. Even though Kezra had formally retired its survey address from her bonded notebook on Day One Hundred and Eighteen before the ascent to Windpit—freeing the active memory slot so she could certify the high alpine shelters—the barrier remained exactly where her class exchange had seated it.
