Two thousand feet below the freezing cave. There, the dark mountain gorge of Mount Sunder opened into the sunlit tiered arena of the Split-Stone valley, sixty men stood waiting along the dark rock embankments.
They weren’t soldiers. They were peasant ditch-wardens, stone-quarry wagon drivers, vineyard smallholders, and flax weavers, dressed in mud-stained wool coats and wooden clogs. In their calloused hands they held heavy oak stop-logs, iron-shod lever poles, and winches strung with greasy hemp cables.
For three days they had watched the high peaks in silence. When the wind had brought the distant, muffled sound of a thunderous rumble from deep within the crags, many had feared that the mountain had collapsed, burying Tomas Reed and his companions in the dark.
Then, high upon the eastern cliff above the gorge mouth, old Kael appeared.
The old mountain guide stood on a projecting pinnacle of chert, his wool coat whipping in the valley wind. In his right hand he held an iron signal lantern fitted with a thick red glass pane.
Suddenly, Kael swung the lantern three times in a wide, sweeping arc.
Three red flashes against the gray limestone crags.
From the black throat of the gorge came a sound the valley had not heard in twenty long years. A low, rhythmic trembling that shook through the dry riverbed stones. It was followed by a rushing wind that carried the sweet, stone scent of deep ice-slow caves.
