Two hours after midnight on Day 149, the high pass camp in the subalpine larch forest was gripped by a sudden, deadly shift in the mountain weather.
A dry, freezing downdraft—what the old miners called the Black Bise—swept down from the unglaciated northern peaks of the Spine. He dropped the heat twenty degrees in the span of thirty minutes. The wind didn’t howl. It slipped through the dense pine needles with a thin, whispering hiss that turned the moisture on the tent canvas into hard, crackling glaze and froze the water in the leather canteens solid to the corks.
Inside the shared four-pole shelter tent that Paxa Sel had pitched in the lee of a massive granite boulder, Kezra Venn lay awake in her sleeping roll.
Her sound right ear was turned toward the center of the tent. She listened to the small sounds of the camp. The soft, regular breathing of Fellis Dain curled in his blankets beside the pack frames, the faint clinking of mule halters from the picket line fifty paces down the slope. The quiet crackle of the lidded iron fire bowl where Paxa kept two charcoal cobbles glowing under ash.
Then came another sound. A ragged, shallow hitch of breath from the far side of the central pole. It was followed by a dry, muffled rattle that sounded like dry birch leaves scraping across slate.
