Emerging from the deep underground air-flow stair into the blinding white daylight of Day 142’s afternoon, Kezra Venn had to pause and shield her eyes against the glare.
The sun had climbed above the southern castle walls of Stonewake Citadel. He reflected off the freshly fallen snow on the high peaks of the Spine with dazzling intensity. The shift from the dense, silent cold of the basal amphibolite fault five hundred paces below to the crisp, wind-whipped mountain air on the surface made her lungs expand with a sharp, tingling shock. Her boots and trouser cuffs were caked with pale white spar-stone slurry from the deep niches. Her hands still kept the cold ache of gripping the iron sounding rod against frozen rock.
Beside her, Paxa Sel paused to untie the wool muffler from her mouth, taking several deep drafts of the dry surface air. “The air up here smells of horse sweat and burning pine,” the healer observed. He looked across the bustling inner bailey. “Down below, it smelled like the bottom of a well that had been sealed before the mountains had names.”
“That’s what five hundred paces of rock smells like,” Yseld Arken said. She stepped out from the stair arch with her hooked climbing staff balanced across her shoulder. “Old, cold, and entirely uninterested in whoever is walking on top of it.”
