The deep pit before them didn’t look like an empty pit. In the blinding whiteout, the deep gap looked matching to the solid road. A flat, unbroken expanse of gray-white fog that gave no visual clue that forty feet of stone shelf had snapped away into the canyon below.
Kael knelt at the edge of the break, probing the void with his eight-foot ash staff. The iron tip met nothing. He leaned forward until his head was over the lip, his breath freezing on his beard.
“The slide took the whole roadbed,” the wagon driver shouted back, his voice strained. “Clean shear down to the granite ribs. If we try to take the sledge across that gap, we’ll slide straight down to the river.”
Nessa moved forward along the lifeline, her hands sliding smoothly along the braided flax. She didn’t look down into the void. She unhooked her dual-cone brass hearing horn from her chest harness. She held the wide flared bell horizontally toward the invisible rock face on their right.
“Stand clear of the bell,” Nessa ordered.
She reached into her coat pocket and withdrew two polished iron land-mapper’s clappers—flat bars of tool steel four inches long, linked by a short brass hinge.
