Night dropped upon Crown-Reach not as a gentle twilight. But as an iron door slamming shut across the sky.
By fifth bell, the northern estuary gale had intensified into a howling, freezing blizzard. Thick, level curtains of sleet and freezing rain swept across the summit of the Great Sky-Spire. It wrapped the four-hundred-foot belfry in a glittering, lethal armor of solid ice. Descent down the outside manila lines was no longer merely dangerous. It was suicidal. At freezing heat levels, the wet ropes had stiffened into rigid, unbending cables as thick as a man’s forearm, their lay frozen solid, preventing the bronze figure-eight descenders from taking a friction bite.
Tomas, Nessa, and Sile were trapped on the four-hundred-foot gallery.
They had pulled back into the western belfry arch—a deep, stone nook four feet wide and six feet deep. There, the massive granite bell-piers offered some shelter from the direct fury of the gale. Across the opening of the arch, Sile had lashed two heavy canvas tarpaulins, securing them to ancient iron ring-bolts with four-part hemp lashings, creating a tiny, three-sided shelter that smelled of wet wool, pine tar, and charcoal smoke.
In the center of the flat stone slabs sat a small cast-iron fire bowl, glowing dull cherry-red with birch charcoal they had hauled up in their tool packs.
