The ice that choked the mouth of the drainage under-road drain was not snow. It was black basal ice. Meltwater that had seeped from the mountain face over fifteen summers and frozen into an unbending stone mass as hard as quartzite.
Tomas knelt on the granite doorstep, bringing his horn lantern close to the iron trash-grate.
The two-inch iron bars were black with scale, but the metal had not thinned. The dry alpine air and sub-zero heat levels had preserved the forged iron from serious rusting. The two padlocks, however, were wrapped in a solid block of semi-clear ice, their keyholes fully plugged with frozen silt.
“Don’t waste your time with keys,” Kael said, clambering down into the trench with a heavy twelve-pound sledgehammer resting on his shoulder. “Even if you had the brass keys from the guard post office, the tumblers inside those locks are frozen into a solid lump of brass and rust. We crack the hasps.”
Tomas touched the cold iron of the right-hand padlock with his bare thumb. He tested the brittleness of the metal. At thirty degrees below zero, forged iron lost its ductility, becoming crystal-clear and prone to fracture under high-speed shock.
“Set the cold chisel against the shackle,” Tomas instructed. “Not against the lock body. The shackle is two inches of forged iron. If you strike it square, the shock will shear the shackle at the notch.”
