The northern trail beyond Waystation Seven was a narrow, wind-drifted notch that skirted the base of the Great Cirque’s hanging glaciers. Here, four leagues past the buried stronghold, the land broke into a wilderness of shattered granite ribs and frozen scree gullies where no road charter had run for fifteen winters.
Tomas Reed walked twenty paces ahead of the lead sledge, his ash snowshoes sinking four inches into the dry, sugary surface powder before the rawhide webbing met the dense firn beneath. The air was thirty-one degrees below zero, motionless and crystal-clear, filled with the faint, rhythmic squeak of the snowshoe frames and the raspy breathing of the four draft mules behind him.
The sledge was heavily laden. Forty crates of prime bolted wheat flour, ten barrels of salt beef, and eight bundles of military woolens lashed under double layers of animal fat-coated duck canvas. Behind the main freight sledge, Kael had hitched a smaller timber trailer—a four-runner hand-sledge carrying dry kindling, forage bags, and the emergency iron fire bowl.
Nessa stopped at the crest of a low moraine ridge, her four-foot boxwood survey rod held vertically against her shoulder. She unhooked her dual-cone brass hearing horn, tilted her head. Then she pointed toward a sheer notch in the black hard speckled rock cliffs a half-league to the northwest.
