Yseld Arken led Adra Pike, Old Toric, and Davren Venn ten paces up the native limestone shoulder above the rockslide. She pointed with the iron butt of her staff to a narrow, natural rock bench that skirted the upper lip of the slip.
“The shale slide took the lower roadbed,” Yseld explained, her experienced eyes tracing the contours of the rock face. “Clearing forty tons of loose scree with hand shovels would take two full days of quarry labor, and every spadeful you pull from the bottom will bring more loose gravel down from the upper bluff. But this upper limestone ledge is native bedrock. It’s twelve paces wide and fully solid. If we can get the litters across this shelf, we can bypass the entire slide and rejoin the carriage road fifty paces below.”
Old Toric knelt on the ledge, tapping the stone with his iron hammer. “The bedrock is solid enough, Mistress Arken. But look at those two projecting pale limestone boulders at the eastern turn. They neck the passage down to seven feet. A single mule can squeeze through. But our four-wheeled medical litters are eight feet wide from axle hub to hub. The hubs will strike that lower rock horn and tip the litters into the gorge.”
