The Blind Sluice was not a natural pass. It was an artificial limestone notch, twenty feet wide and a hundred paces long, blasted through a spur of Mount Sunder forty years ago to allow royal artillery to bypass the avalanche chutes of the outer face.
In summer, it was a dry, echo-filled hall of shattered rock. In midwinter, it was a wind tunnel of murderous ferocity.
The gale that poured through the Sluice was tightly packed by the upright rock walls, doubling in speed until the air roared with the ear-splitting pitch of an iron foundry. The wind carried a nonstop blast of granular firn. Tiny pellets of hard, crystal-clear ice that scoured the ash timbers of the sledge and stripped the gray paint from the toolboxes in minutes.
Tomas stood at the entrance to the notch, his goggles fogged with moisture that had to be scraped away with his thumb every thirty seconds.
“We can’t haul through the center!” Kael shouted, his mouth pressed against Tomas’s ear. “The wind in the middle of the cut will pick the sledge up and roll it on its side! We have to hug the lee wall on the north side!”
Tomas looked at the northern wall. A narrow shelf of ice, two paces wide, ran along the base of the rock where the limestone had been undercut by old water runoff.
