The convoy had cleared the Devil’s Squeeze and was regrouping on the wide limestone shelf above Waystation Five when Nessa Vale raised her hand, signaling an immediate halt.
She was standing on a granite outcrop seventy paces ahead of the lead sledge, her four-foot boxwood survey rod held horizontally across her chest. She had her double-cone brass hearing horn raised to her right ear. She pointed down into the lower gorge where the road dropped toward the valley.
Tomas walked up to her side, his snowshoes crunching in the wind-slab. “What do you hear, Nessa?”
“A shod horse,” she said, her voice dropping into its crisp, technical rhythm. “Three miles below us, on the shelf road between Station One and the toll-gate. An iron horseshoe striking frozen limestone.”
Tomas unslung his brass field transit from his pack, mounted the telescope on its short tripod. Then he focused the lenses on the switchbacks of the lower gorge.
Through the clear, cold mountain air, the valley floor was visible two leagues below. A patchwork of gray fields, frozen canals, and the clustered timber roofs of Low Sunder.
On the third switchback of the Devil’s Stairs, two miles down the mountain, a lone rider was climbing the snow road.
