The trail above the toll-gate ceased to be a road within a quarter-league. It became a shelf. A narrow ledge blasted from the gray limestone cliff eighty feet above the frozen bed of the Sunder Torrent.
The wind here didn’t blow in gusts. It was a solid, unbending river of air that poured down from the high cirques, cold enough that the moisture on Tomas’s eyelashes froze into white beads with every blink. To keep his eyes from icing shut, he wore a pair of mountain goggles Kael had provided. Two oval discs of carved mountain ash with level slits half an inch wide. It was bound to his head with strips of greased leather.
The narrow slits cut the blinding glare of the snow and shielded his eyeballs from the scouring mountain dust. Even so, they reduced his field of vision to a sharp, level band of gray rock and churning white drift.
Kael led the mules. He walked with the heavy, rolling gait of a man who had spent forty years matching his stride to draft beasts. He held no reins. He carried an eight-foot ash staff tipped with a blunt iron chisel. He probed the snow before every step to test the thickness of the wind-slab.
