The Last Descent from Blackhorn Peak

• Chapter 1 The Silence at the Base
• Chapter 2 The Sledge Across the Ice
• Chapter 3 A Count of Remaining Lanterns
• Chapter 4 The Frozen Knot Unbound
• Chapter 5 Blood on the Lower Glacier
• Chapter 6 The Whispering Crevasse
• Chapter 7 What Was Left Behind
• Chapter 8 Shadows on the Ravine
• Chapter 9 The Broken Stretcher
• Chapter 10 The Seventh Oath
• Chapter 11 Echoes in the Ice Cave
• Chapter 12 The Eyes Beneath the Frost
• Chapter 13 The False Summit's Toll
• Chapter 14 A Phantom on the Ridge
• Chapter 15 The Screaming Wind
• Chapter 16 The Shrine of the First Cold
• Chapter 17 Ropes Against the Dark
• Chapter 18 The Unmarked Precipice
• Chapter 19 Before the Avalanche Fell
• Chapter 20 The Keeper’s Warning
• Chapter 21 The Signal Fire at Midnight
• Chapter 22 Crossing the Devil's Tooth
• Chapter 23 The Gathering at the High Hut
• Chapter 24 The Lost Wayfarer
• Chapter 25 The First Distress Bell
• Chapter 26 The Ascent Begins

The valley did not receive them with open arms, nor with weeping, but with the flat, indifferent quiet of frozen sod. When the runners of the ash-wood sledge scraped against the slate flagstones outside the chapel of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens, the noise was shockingly loud. It sounded like an iron shovel striking a buried skull. Brother Thomas let go of his traces first. His leather harness dropped into the gray slush, stiffened instantly into an awkward hoop by the draft that rolled off the lower scree. His hands remained curved like dried hooks, the black pigskin mittens frozen solid to the shape of the hemp cordage he had dragged since the moraine gave out.

Behind him, three men stood swaying on legs that had forgotten the luxury of level dirt. There had been nine when the rope left the valley floor on the feast of Saint Agnes, but arithmetic is a delicate thing above four thousand paces. In the high valleys of the Grisons, the Church taught that seven was the number of divine order, yet four was what remained: Thomas, who had the compass; Father Christian, whose frostbit lips were sewn shut by scabs; the carter’s lad, Luc, who wept without making a sound because tears froze faster than marrow; and Brother Mathias, who dragged the rear trace with a broken femur splinted in hazel twigs and raw wool.

"Do not let the boy sit," Father Christian muttered. The words did not come through his lips, which were split to the red gums, but emerged through his nostrils with a wet, bubbling rattle. "If he sits upon the stone, he will never rise to take the broth. His knees will set like tallow."

Thomas did not look back at Luc. He looked instead at the great arched door of the hostelry. Its iron studs were swollen with white rime, furred over by three days of northern gale that had hammered the valley while they were up in the gray ceiling. No smoke came from the stone chimney. That was the first true error of the day. A village might forget its prayers, and an innkeeper might cheat on the rye measure, but no man who lived within sight of the Blackhorn ever let the hearth die while an expedition was upon the horns. A chimney without smoke was a tongue cut out of a mouth.

"The doors are bolted from within," Mathias said from the rear. He had not fallen, though he leaned his weight entirely against the uprights of the sledge. The sledge was three fathoms long, built of cleft larch bound with raw rawhide that had dried as tight as iron hoops. Upon it lay the bundle. It was swaddled in oiled hemp, lashed fifteen times with greasy sheep-gut cord, and pinned beneath three cross-staves of rowan wood. It was longer than a Christian man had any right to be, even a carinthian timber-feller, and it smelled neither of rot nor of man, but of old cellar earth and vinegar. "They have heard the bells," Mathias added, nodding toward the bellcote above the stables. The bronze hung cocked sideways, iced to its yoke. "They knew we were coming down the gully before noon."

"They are not hiding from us," Thomas said. He peeled off his outer mitten with his teeth. The skin of his inner palm came with the wool, leaving a raw, yellow patch that did not bleed. The cold was too thick for blood; it moved like cold porridge in the veins. He walked toward the chapel porch, his boots making the short, dry squeak of iron on packed snow. "The cattle are dead."

The stable door stood four fingers ajar, blocked by a drift that had the hard, scalloped crust of three tides of wind. Inside, the dark smelled of manure that had turned to stone. When Thomas thrust his staff against the timber, the hinges gave a single, shrieking gasp that died against the rafters. There were seven stalls. In five of them, the black Valais sheep stood upright, their heads pressed into the corners of the dry hay-racks, their wool coated in an ash-fine dust of hoarfrost. They did not shift when the light entered. They did not blink. Their small, amber eyes had sunk into their heads until they looked like dried prunes pressed into suet.

Luc had crawled up the three steps of the porch on his knees, his chin dragging across the granite threshold. "The kettle," he whispered. His teeth were chattering with a rhythmic, mechanical click that sounded like an adze working green birch. "Brother Thomas. The salt lard. Master Gervaise said there would be lard in the crock behind the salt-box."

"Master Gervaise is not in the buttery," Thomas said. He walked past the boy, his boots leaving dry, gray crescents of mountain grit upon the spruce boards of the vestibule.

The common room of the hostelry was sixty feet square, held up by four great balks of chestnut that had been felled before the house of Austria took the valley. A tallow candle had burned down into a puddle on the long table, drowning three dead weevils in its grease. The iron pot hung over the hearth upon a hooked chain, but the soup inside it was a greenish block of ice through which the white ribs of a marmot protruded like spokes. On the wall, the great spruce cross remained, but someone had hung a greasy pack-harness over the arms of the Savior, as if using the Crucified as a peg for mule-tack.

"Where are the women?" Father Christian asked. He had followed them inside, though he kept his back to the walls as he had done for four days among the couloirs. When a man spends ninety hours listening for the crack of an ice-shelf, his shoulder blades itch whenever they have nothing solid behind them. He carried his iron-shod staff across his chest like an abbot’s crosier, though the ash shaft was notched every three inches where they had used it to sound the bridges. "There were six girls from the lower parish hired for the spinning. And the smith’s widow."

"Gone down to the timber-fall," Thomas said, though he knew the timber-fall was four leagues south through drifts that would drown a mule. He went to the sideboard and found what he sought: the stone bottle of gentian spirit. The liquor was gray with suspended crystals, cold enough to blister the tongue, but it had not turned to crystal like the water-butt. He pulled the wooden peg with his teeth and spat it onto the floor. "Drink this, Luc. Do not take more than three swallows or your belly will cast it back."

The boy took the stone jar between two fists that were swollen to the thickness of loaves. He could not bend his wrists; he had to tilt his whole torso backward to bring the lip to his mouth. A thin dribble of yellowish liquor ran through his split lip and down the wool of his jerkin, smelling instantly of mountain roots and bitter moss. He choked, a dry, barking cough that brought no blood, only a puff of gray vapor from his chest.

Mathias did not come inside. He remained on the terrace, standing by the sledge, his hand resting on the third cross-stave. Through the open door, Thomas could see his silhouette against the white glare of the lower cirque. The mist was coming down now from the Devil’s Tooth, not in clouds, but in that uniform, curdled blanket that makes the sky and the snow-crust into the same gray sheet.

"We must unbind it," Mathias called out. His voice was high and thin, the voice of a man whose ribs are broken beneath his leathers. "The wind is turning south-southwest. If the thaw takes it before we have the iron pins in the lime, it will slacken."

"Let it stay upon the sledge," Thomas said, stepping back into the light. The gentian had done nothing for his fingers; they were white to the second knuckle, the color of salt pork. "We have no lime. We have no peat. The charcoal bin in the forge is half-drowned in rime."

"It cannot remain on the wood," Father Christian said. He had found a tallow stub in his scrip and was trying to strike a spark against his steel, but his hand was shaking so violently that the flint struck only the brass ring of his girdle. Each missed stroke made a tiny tink-tink that sounded like an insect behind the wainscot. "The rule of the Order says that whatever is brought down from the Third Tier belongs to the parish floor. It must lie upon the consecrated rock, or the weight does not leave our backs."

Thomas looked down at his own chest. The broad hemp strap had bitten through his frieze coat, through his sheepskin doublet, and through two shirts of unbleached flax. He could feel the ridge across his sternum, a broad, hot welt that felt as though a red-hot spade were being held against the bone. Even now, with the traces lying slack in the snow, he felt the drag. Every man who pulled the sledge felt it: the strange, lateral jerk that came not from the ground, but from the load itself, as if the thing inside the canvas were trying to find an edge, trying to lean toward the drop.

"Help me with the boy first," Thomas said.

They carried Luc into the pantry, not because it was warm, but because it had fewer windows than the great hall. The mountain seemed to peer into the high rooms; its gray, notched head hung over the slate roof like an overseer at a stone-trench. They laid the lad upon three sacks of split peas that were as hard as gravel. Mathias dragged his splinted leg behind him with a dry rustle of dried bents, his hazel twigs snapping one by one as he forced the limb over the door-sill.

"His shoes must come off," Father Christian muttered. "If the feet go green before the sun drops, we will have to saw them with the hay-knife."

"Leave them," Thomas said. "The leather is frozen into the meat. If you pull the hide, the toes will stay in the heel-cap. We must wait until the oil burns."

"What oil?" Mathias asked. He sat upon a barrel of salt herring, his sound leg stretched out, his gray face beaded with the greasy sweat that precedes the bone-fever. "The valley is dry, Thomas. Look at the road. Look down toward the gorge."

Thomas walked back to the stone parapet that edged the chapel terrace. Below them, the trail dropped through the dwarf-pines in nine great loops before disappearing into the cleft where the waters of the Black Aare usually roared. But there was no water. The fall was a blue-green pillar twenty paces thick, fixed between the cliffs like a tooth in a jaw. And along the road, where the hay-sledges usually left brown ruts in the February crust, there was nothing. No footprints. No wheel-marks. No dog-dung. Only the long, ribbed terraces of wind-scoured ice, running down into the shadow of the lower forest like the stairs of an empty cellar.

The world below was as dead as the world above.

"They have not fled," Thomas said, more to himself than to the priest. "A village that runs leaves iron behind. They leave a kettle that was too heavy, or a pig that went lame in the hocks. There is no pig on the road. There is no bed-tick."

"The bell," Mathias said again, his voice dropping into that rhythmic, singsong cadence men use when their minds begin to walk the ridges without them. "The third watch had not ended when we saw the smoke from the high saddle. We saw it, Thomas. Two columns. One from the churchyard and one from the bailiff's roof. A white smoke, like wet alder."

"It was not smoke," Father Christian said. He was still trying to strike his steel, his knuckles raw and bloody from the flint. "It was the drift off the needles. The wind plays tricks through the split rock. It looks like chimney-smoke when the sun hits the crystals from behind the Horn."

"I know the smoke of alder," Mathias whispered. "My father burned it forty winters for the smithy. Alder has a blue foot and a gray belly. It was smoke."

Thomas ignored them. He returned to the larch sledge. The three staves of rowan wood were bowed tight across the canvas, held by iron pins that had been driven into the sledge-frame with a stonemason’s maul. Around each pin, the wood was stained with a curious, greasy blackness, as if the timber were charring from within. He laid his bare palm against the coarse hemp.

It was not cold.

After seventy hours on the ice, through the Great Shingle and the Wind-Gut where the gale stripped the wool from their sleeves, the canvas should have been like an iron plate. It should have burned the flesh with the white fire of three thousand paces. But under Thomas’s hand, the fabric had the limp, sodden texture of a wet horse-blanket, and beneath it, something gave way slightly. A soft, elastic resistance, like the breast of a dead capercaillie that has lain in the larder for three days.

"Father," Thomas called.

The priest did not look up from his stone. Tink. Tink. Tink. The sparks died as they fell through the frozen air, orange specks that vanished before they could touch the charred lint.

"Christian. Come here."

The old man shuffled out, his boots dragging. His cassock was ripped up the left flank where an ice-axe had caught it during the crossing of the moraine, and through the gap his gray drawers showed, crusted with yellow ice from his own water. A man forgets his shame after forty-eight hours on the rope; he pees where he stands and lets the wind carry it against his thighs.

"Put your hand upon the middle stave," Thomas said.

The priest hesitated. His eyes were small, red-rimmed holes in a mask of scabbed, purple skin. "It is not permitted. The seal was made at the high cairn. By Brother Martin."

"Martin is three hundred fathoms down the chimney," Thomas said flatly. "And his seal was made of butter and pine-gum. It has cracked. Look there."

He pointed to the head of the sledge. Between the two uprights of the frame, where the hemp was knotted into a great crown-hitch, the gum had turned white and brittle, like the sugar on a holiday cake. It had shattered into a thousand tiny scales that were blowing away one by one in the draft from the stable. And through the gap in the canvas, something was visible.

It was not hair. It was not the gray frieze of a monk’s cowl, nor the goat-skin of a herdsman’s jacket. It was a pale, fibrous substance, like the inner bark of a water-logged willow, but it was set with dozens of small, hard discs the size of a copper groschen. They were the color of horn, slightly cupped, and each one had a tiny hole in the center from which a single, clear drop of fluid oozed with rhythmic regularity.

Drop.

The fluid did not freeze as it struck the sledge-timber. It ran down the larch runner, leaving a clear, wet line that smoked faintly in the zero-degree air.

"Lord God of Sabaoth," Christian whispered. He did not drop to his knees; his joints would not allow it. He simply leaned forward until his forehead touched the wood beside Thomas’s hand. His breath made no frost against the canvas. "We carried it nine leagues. We did not lose the traces."

"Why did we bring it down?" Thomas asked.

The question sounded strange in his own ears, like something asked by a child or an idiot. Yet for the life of him, as he stood on the flagstones of Saint Jude-in-the-Fens, with the dead sheep behind him and the empty valley before him, he could not remember the face of the man who had given the order.

There had been a paper. Yes, a parchment with three red wafers affixed to the tail, brought up by the runner from Chur on the eve of the Epiphany. It had smelled of saffron and the seal-wax of the Bishop’s chancery. But the runner had not stayed to drink the small beer; he had turned his mule on the road and whipped it back toward the low country as if the plague were at his heels.

"To the churchyard," Christian said, his forehead still against the stave. "To be put under the lime-flags. Where the frost cannot find it. That was what Martin read from the script."

"Martin could not read the Latin," Thomas said. He felt a sudden, terrible desire to laugh, but his dry throat produced only a sound like dry birch bark scraping together. "Martin could not read the names of the seven kings of the Amorites, let alone the Bishop's chancery hand. He looked at the wax and he said: The horn has spoken, brothers. Fetch the sledges."

"He was the Warden," the priest said stubbornly.

"He is in the chimney," Thomas repeated. "And we are here. And the village is gone."

From the pantry, a faint groan rolled out into the common room. It was not Luc; Luc was past groaning. His breathing had taken on that dry, three-stroke rattle that the brothers called the weaver's shuttle, which means a man will not see the candle go out. It was Mathias. He was trying to stand, his splintered hazel twigs clicking against the herring barrel.

"Thomas!" the cripple shouted. His voice had the flat, bell-like clarity of the mountain madness. "The light! The light is behind the ice!"

Thomas walked to the door of the hall. Mathias was not looking down the valley, nor up at the high ridge from which they had spent three days falling. He was staring at the chapel wall.

Saint Jude’s had three small, round-headed lancets on the north side, cut through four feet of granite to keep the snow-weight from bursting the walls. They were glazed not with glass—which was too dear for an upland parish—but with thin sheets of mountain gypsum, scraped until they were translucent. Usually they showed only the gray, dead sky or the white slope of the churchyard drift.

Now, they were green.

It was the cold, greasy green of stagnant river-water in August, or the belly of a dead pike. The light did not shift. It did not flicker like a torch or stream like the dawn. It sat in the stone openings like an oily gel, casting long, square beams across the spruce floorboards. In the middle of the room, where the beams crossed, the frost upon the table was melting. Not into water—it was not warm enough for water—but into a gray, curdled sludge that ran toward the floor in slow, thick ribbons.

"We have to go back," Father Christian whispered from the terrace. He had not seen the windows, but he had smelled the air that was now coming out of the church door. It smelled of old silt, of stones that had never seen the sun since the foundations of the world were laid down under the deep ice. "Thomas. The rope is still whole. We have four iron spikes left, and the short maul."

"Go back where?" Thomas turned on him. "Up the Great Shingle? With one lad dead and Mathias on three legs? We could not climb the lower ice-step with an empty scrip, let alone with our leathers."

"Not to the summit," Christian said. His eyes were wide now, the pupils dilated until the blue iris was nothing but a thin rim around the black. "To the shelf. Where the cabin was. Where we left the third sledge."

"There is no cabin," Thomas said. He felt his hands begin to throb, a deep, sickening pulse that seemed to beat in time with the drops falling from the canvas. "You saw the drift. It took the roof-tree before we had the knots cast off the middle runner. There is only the rock, Christian. The rock and the wind."

"Then into the ditch," the old man said. He seized the lapels of Thomas’s coat with his frozen mittens, his thumbs digging into the wool. "Thomas. We have dragged it down into the trough. The cold cannot get out of the valley now. Don't you see it? It has followed the wood. As long as the runners were moving, it stayed behind the trace. But now we have stopped. We have set the iron upon the stones."

The sledge gave a low, dull creak.

It was not the wind. The air on the terrace was dead, suspended in that heavy, sulfurous hush that comes before a major slip on the southern slopes.

The larch runner had settled another half-inch into the stone. But it had not chipped the slate; the slate had softened beneath it. The gray rock around the runners looked like wet curd, gray and porous, with tiny bubbles of gas rising through the stone-dust.

Thomas went back to the bundle. His movements were slow, deliberate, the movements of a carter whose mule has broken its back in a ditch and who knows what must be done with the small iron axe beneath the seat. He reached into his belt and took out the skinning knife. It was a common tool, four inches of Solingen steel with an ash handle held by two copper rivets, worn down to a curved sickle-shape by twenty years of dressing deer and cutting frozen harness.

"Do not cut the third knot," Mathias screamed from the door. He was clinging to the lintel now, his face the color of wood-ash. "The third knot was tied by the Keeper! It has the salt in it!"

Thomas did not look at the knots. He laid the blade against the middle stave—the rowan branch that was bowed so hard it hummed like a psaltery string.

"In the name of the Father," he said. He had forgotten the rest of the Latin. It had slipped from his mind somewhere between the high couloir and the scree, blown out of his ears by sixty hours of gale. "In the name of the house," he amended.

He drove the knife down, not into the wood, but into the thick hemp binding that held the stave to the frame.

The cord parted with a sound like a pistol shot.

Instantly, the tension on the wood was released. The rowan branch did not snap outward; it whipped inward, as if the thing beneath the canvas had sucked it down. The hemp cloth split from the head-harness to the middle lashings with a long, wet tear that sounded like a cow’s hide being ripped from the ribs in the shambles.

Father Christian did not pray. He dropped his flint into the slush and covered his face with his mittens, turning his back to the sledge and pressing his forehead against the rough plaster of the chapel wall.

Thomas stood over the opening.

There was no face. There were no limbs, though there were things that had the joints of limbs, arranged in the order of a centipede or a dried river-crab. It was covered in a thick, clear slime that did not freeze, even where the draft off the scree blew directly across its surface. In the center of the mass, where the chest of a man should have risen and fallen, there was a cavity lined with rows of small, blunt plates of white bone, like the pharyngeal teeth of a giant carp.

And inside the cavity, resting upon a bed of gray, hairy lichen that seemed to be growing from the thing’s own substance, lay the copper crucifix that had belonged to the chapel of Saint Jude since the time of the third bishop.

It was not broken. It was not tarnished. It was bright and yellow, as if it had just come from the sand-mold in the foundry at Chur.

Only it was not cold.

Thomas reached out his hand, his split, yellow fingers hovering two inches above the metal. He could feel the warmth coming off the copper—not the warmth of a fire or a living body, but that dry, heavy heat that comes from a lime-kiln when the stones begin to crumble into white dust.

"It was never lost," Thomas said. His voice was very quiet now. He did not feel the wind. He did not feel the cold in his feet, which had gone as dead and heavy as two blocks of larch-wood. "The shepherd did not lose it in the snow."

Mathias did not answer. The clicking in the pantry had stopped. Luc’s shuttle had finished its work, and the boy was now just another frozen thing on the pea-sacks, no different from the sheep in the stalls or the marmot ribs in the kettle.

"Christian," Thomas said. "Look at the bellcote."

The priest did not move. He was weeping now, his tears freezing into his beard, welding his chin to the collar of his sheepskin.

Thomas looked up alone.

Above the hostelry, where the high gully rose toward the great amphitheater of the Blackhorn, the trail was no longer empty. The gray mist had lifted three fingers above the snow, just enough to show the lower ice-fall.

There were six of them coming down.

They did not have sledges. They did not have poles. They moved with the strange, rhythmic shuffle of men who are linked by a single hemp trace, their heads down, their gray coats fluttering behind them like the rags on a scarecrow. They were coming along the ridge where the snow had been scoured to the black rock—the ridge that no Christian man could walk even with iron cramps upon his heels.

And at the front of the rope walked Brother Martin. His cowl was gone, and his gray hair was blown out into a stiff, white fan by the wind, but Thomas could see the red leather scrip at his hip—the one that held the Bishop's paper with the three wafers.

Martin was not looking at the path. He was looking down at the hostelry, his arms held out from his sides for balance, his feet making no tracks upon the white slope, as if he were walking across the surface of a pond that had frozen before the ripples could die away.

Behind him, the trace stretched tight—sixty paces of greasy hemp that did not sag, held up between the moving figures as straight as an iron rod.

"Father," Thomas said, his hand still poised over the bright, warm cross in the sledge. "You can put away the flint. We will not need the candle."

Four hours before the runners struck the churchyard slate, there was only the sound of iron grating over grit-shot ice. The moraine of the lower tongue was not ice as lowlanders imagined it—not the clear, jewel-green sheets that skimmed millponds in November, but an ancient, compressed snout of gray matter that had digested three thousand winters of falling slate and mountain sheep. It was buckled into ridges as hard and jagged as pig iron, cross-hatched with gutters where the winter melt had carved narrow sluices and then frozen solid again, slippery as wet lard.

Brother Thomas pulled at the right fore-brace. Behind him, the load had its own terrible, stubborn momentum. A sledge hauling dry hay or split cordwood followed a man’s heels like an honest dog, running true to the ruts and swinging wide only when the gradient demanded it. This ash-wood rig did not follow; it nudged. Every three strides, when the left runner caught on the rim of an ice-runnel, the front crossbar gave a sharp, vicious lurch into Thomas’s kidneys, as if the timber itself were eager to outrun the men dragging it down into the ditch.

"Keep the trace taut, boy," Thomas growled over his shoulder. The gray wool muffler wrapped three times around his mouth had turned into an oval of solid ice that smelled of old saliva and horse-tallow. "If you let the slack touch the crust, the runner will bite the cord and sheer it like a carrot. Then we’ll all go sliding down to Chur on our backsides."

Luc did not answer with words, but the hemp rope between them gave a short, frantic jerk. The lad was fifteen, the third son of a drayman from the lower valley who had given him to the brotherhood because an extra mouth at the winter table cost more than a funeral mass. He was small for his years, built like a hazel switch, and his boots were three sizes too large, stuffed with crushed rye-straw that had long since ground down into cold, yellow chaff. He walked with his head bent entirely toward the crust, his chin tucked so deeply into the breast of his greasy sheepskin that he looked like a headless trunk stumbling forward on two swollen bundles of rag.

On the left trace, Father Christian took smaller, deliberate steps. He walked with the heavy, unhurried gait of an ox turning a plough in clay, setting each crampon into the rime with a sharp, crunching stamp that broke through the wind-crust into the firmer ice beneath. The priest had lost his hat somewhere on the second lip of the traverse, and the cowl of his habit was caked with a white mantle of frozen hoar that made him look like a chalk effigy dragged out of an abbey wall. His rosary, carved from the knuckle-bones of ibex and strung on catgut, rattled against his belt with every lurch of the sledge, a small, rhythmic clack that was the only steady timekeeper left in the high cirque.

"The grade is slackening," Father Christian said. The wind took the words and whipped them out across the white gulf on their left, so that his voice sounded as thin as the whistle of a marmot. "We are half a league from the tree-line. If the boy can hold his feet until the firs, the wind will break."

"The firs are dead," Mathias called from the drag-rope behind the sledge. He had two ash pick-poles tucked beneath his armpits like crutches, his bad leg swinging between them like a bundle of butcher’s suet, the hazel-splints squeaking with every swing. He had tied the rear brake-rope around his waist, letting his own trailing deadweight act as an anchor whenever the sledge threatened to override the men in front. "I smelled the turpentine two miles back. The frost has split the trunks from the sapwood out. A dead tree doesn't break a gale, Father. It just drops branches on your skull to save the cold the trouble of finishing you."

"Save your wind for the drag, Mathias," Thomas said without turning. "If your jaw is working that easily, you're not leaning your weight into the hemp."

"My weight is all that’s keeping this timber from taking you by the heels, Thomas," the cripple shot back, though his breath came in short, ragged gasps that ended in wet wheezes. "Look at the track. Look at the ice beneath the wood."

Thomas looked down between his boots. The glacier should have shown the white, powdered scoring of their crampon-irons, or the dull gray scars left by the ash runners. But where the sledge passed, the surface did not chip. It peeled. A thin, transparent film of moisture rose beneath the runners, smoking into the sub-zero air like hot water splashed onto a flagstone. It was not enough to make the sledge run free; it had a thick, sticky drag to it, like cold linseed oil, that clung to the ash wood and sucked at the hemp lashings.

The load rode between them like an unhewn boundary stone. It had taken all six of them—back when Martin was still shouting his three-word orders into the gale—to lever the mass onto the sledge bed with ash handspikes. They had wrapped it in three thicknesses of heavy, oil-cured wagon canvas that had been boiled in mutton tallow to turn the sleet, but the canvas had long since ceased to behave like cloth. The cold of the upper pass had frozen the fabric into an iron-hard shell, ribbed with thick creases that did not yield when Thomas kicked them to test the lashings.

Across the chest of the bundle, three curved bows of green rowan wood were pinned to the side-rails with square iron spikes. Martin had cut those branches himself from the scrub grove that clung to the southern shelf below the hermit’s cell, peeling the bark with his thumbnail while he muttered the prayers for the deliverance of cattle from the murrain. The wood was fresh enough that droplets of sap still oozed from the severed ends, frozen into pale green beads that looked like glass rosary beads.

"It’s shifting again," Luc whispered. His voice was a dry croak that barely reached Thomas’s shoulder.

"The ropes are tight, boy," Thomas said, though he felt the truth of the lad’s complaint through his own ribs. The harness did not pull true. It had a sickening, counter-clockwise torque that pulled Thomas’s right shoulder downward toward the slope. It was the same motion a dead ox made when its belly began to swell with gas on the third day after slaughter, a slow, internal settling that shifted the balance without moving an inch of the hide.

"Not the ropes," Luc said, his eyes rolling back toward the gray sky for a terrifying second before he caught his balance with an iron-shod pole. "The weight. It isn't lying on the wood. It’s reaching down. It wants the ice, Brother Thomas. It wants to go into the crack."

"Keep your eyes on the ruts," Thomas commanded, his voice hardening into the flat rasp he used when the novices neglected the stable cleaning. "There are no cracks here. We are across the great transverse. We have three hundred yards of solid ground-ice before the sheep-paths begin. Think about the tavern cellar. Think about the salt mutton hanging from the chestnut balks."

"There is no mutton," Mathias muttered from behind the sledge, his voice dropping into that dark, monotonous mutter that had plagued him since they left the high hut. "The snow has been on the valley for seven weeks. If Gervaise had a sheep left alive, he ate it before the Epiphany. We’ll be chewing boiled harness leather before the sun touches the Tooth, mark my word."

"Then we will boil your boots, Mathias," Father Christian said, his boots crunching steadily in the crust. "The leather is older and likely has more grease left in the heel. Now shut your teeth before the draft takes the rest of your tongue."

They moved down the tongue in silence for another hundred yards, the mountain looming above them like an indifferent wall of wet slate. The gale had settled into a flat, steady press from the northeast, bringing no new flakes, but scouring the ancient, frozen banks of the moraine and hurling the fine, needle-sharp dust into the gaps of their clothing. It found the seams of Thomas’s breeches; it packed itself into the wool of his armpits; it settled around the rims of his eyes until every blink felt like the scraping of two pieces of dry sandstone.

Ahead of them, the ice narrowed into a waist between two low outcrops of black schist that the shepherds called the Wolf’s Jaws. In summer, it was a nuisance of loose scree and nettles where sheep frequently threw their shoes; now, it was a smooth, blue-tinted shoot of polished ice where the wind was funnelled into a screaming bore.

"Rope short!" Father Christian commanded, coming to a halt. His heels dug into the crust, the iron points of his shoes screeching like a pig in a gate. "Thomas, haul the boy in. If the sledge takes the slide first, it will pull him through the gap like a thread through a needle."

Thomas hauled on the front trace with his bare palms, ignoring the dull, tearing sensation as the frozen hide of his mitten tore away another layer of skin. Luc stumbled back toward him, his face covered in a mask of gray rime that gave his young features the terrible, ancient dignity of a corpse in an ossuary. His nose was white at the tip, hard as a bone button.

"Take the rear stave," Thomas told the boy, shoving him toward the sledge frame. "Hold the timber with both hands. If the sledge begins to run, do not try to hold it with your arms. Throw your belly across the crossbar and let your knees drag. Do you hear me?"

Luc nodded, his eyes wide and vacant, staring not at the timber, but at the center of the bundle.

The oilskin had cracked.

It had not torn along a seam. A zigzag fracture, three spans long, had opened across the middle of the hemp cover, just beneath the second rowan stave. The gap was only two fingers wide, but in the gray glare of the ice-fall, Thomas could see that there was no wool beneath the canvas. There was no sheepskin coat, no linen shroud, no coarse homespun of a mountain brother’s habit.

There was only a thick layer of coarse, yellow fat that had the consistency of old tallow from a soap-boiler’s vat, through which ran hundreds of fine, dark threads that looked like horsehair. They did not lie still. Despite the sub-zero draft that shrieked through the rock gap, the fibers were waving slowly, like the weeds in the tail-race of a mill during a July drought.

"Father," Thomas said, his throat suddenly so dry that the name came out as a hiss.

Father Christian had already seen it. He did not cross himself; his right hand was frozen around the shaft of his ice-axe, the knuckles swollen into purple knots that could not have released the ash handle without the aid of a mallet. Instead, he stepped close to the sledge, his heavy iron boot coming down within an inch of the split canvas.

"Drive the pin," the priest said.

"What pin?" Thomas asked.

"The box-pin from your scrip. The one from the altar-casket."

Thomas reached into the leather pouch at his hip, his numb fingers fumbling among the tallow stubs, the spare points for the crampons, and the three iron nails he had pulled from the lintel of the high hut before they abandoned it to the drift. His hand closed on a piece of cold, square-forged iron four inches long, tipped with a triangular point that had been quenched in holy oil at the cathedral in Coire three seasons ago.

"Where?"

"Through the wood," Father Christian muttered, his red-rimmed eyes darting toward the narrow couloir between the rocks. "Through the green rowan. Pin it to the larch bed. It’s smelling the valley, Thomas. It knows the difference between the blue ice and the dirt."

Thomas did not ask how an armful of tallow and frozen hair could smell the dirt. He set the iron pin against the green wood of the center stave, directly above the split in the hemp. He took the short, flat-headed stonemason's hammer from his girdle.

He struck once.

The sound did not ring out with the sharp ping of iron against iron. It made a deep, dead thud, like an axe falling into a waterlogged spruce log. The iron pin sank two inches into the green wood, but the rowan did not split. Instead, a thick, dark drop of sap welled up around the square hole, sizzling against the cold iron with a faint, oily whisper.

Beneath the canvas, the mass gave a distinct, shuddering jerk.

It was not the motion of an animal trying to rise; it was the sharp, reflexive twitch of a tendon when a butcher strikes the knuckle of a bullock. The sledge rocked upon its runners, the left rail lifting two inches off the blue ice before slamming down again with a force that sent a white star of fractures radiating out through the crust.

Mathias let out a high, ragged shriek from the rear. "The trace! It’s biting!"

The rope around the cripple’s waist had snapped taut. The sledge had lunged forward three paces into the mouth of the Wolf’s Jaws, dragging Thomas with it. His feet slipped on the greasy surface; his knees struck the blue crust with an impact that made his teeth snap together, drawing the hot, salty taste of blood from his tongue. He did not let go of the fore-brace. He dug the iron picks of his boots into the rime, his toes screaming in their wet leather, until his belly was pressed flat against the sledge-rail.

"Hold!" Father Christian bellowed. The old priest threw his entire bulk across the rear staves, his heavy frieze habit smothering the split in the canvas like a wet blanket. "Mathias, use the picks! Put the ash into the ice!"

The cripple drove his two poles into the surface with the frantic fury of an oarsman caught in a weir. The iron tips gouged long, white furrows through the crust, throwing showers of frozen salt into Thomas’s face. The sledge groaned, the green rowan bows curving until they were almost double, the larch runners screaming against the narrow granite throat of the gap.

For three long breaths, the balance held.

The wind howled through the rocks, smelling of ancient dust and the dry lichen of places where no bird had ever nested. Between Thomas’s knees, the canvas under the priest’s chest felt terrifyingly hot. It was not the warmth of life; it was that strange, greasy heat that gathers in a damp haystack before the internal rot catches fire and burns the barn to the foundation-stones.

Then, with a slow, grinding heave that made every timber in the sledge complain, the load settled back down onto the runners.

"The pin held," Thomas gasped, spitting a mouthful of bloody slush onto his sleeve. His chest burned where the hemp harness had cut through his sheepskin, leaving a broad, numbness that spread down toward his ribs.

Father Christian did not get up immediately. He remained lying across the bundle, his face buried in the rough wool of his sleeve, his back rising and falling with long, shuddering gasps that rattled through his scabby nostrils. When he finally pushed himself up, his eyes were dull and cloudy, like the water in a tanner's pit.

"It wasn't the pin," the priest whispered, his voice so low that Thomas had to lean his frozen ear to the old man's mouth to hear it above the gale. "Look at the rock."

On the right-hand wall of the Wolf’s Jaws, three spans above the ice-line, a rough cross had been hacked into the black schist with a cold chisel. It was not the work of their brotherhood; it had been cut there fifty winters ago, when the first pack-mules had been brought over the pass to pay the Bishop’s tithe in dried ling and copper pots.

Around the chisel-marks, the black stone was dry.

Everywhere else in the couloir, the rock was coated with a thumb-thick crust of blue rime that had been built up by weeks of mountain drift. But around that five-inch cross, the stone was as bare and black as an oven-brick, the rock surface sweating tiny, clear beads of moisture that gathered into a trickle and froze into a row of tiny, clear icicles three inches lower down.

"The ground is old here," Father Christian said, leaning heavily upon his ash staff as he dragged his boots under him. "The valley people have said prayers at this stone every spring since the great murrain of ninety-eight. The thing knows the mark. It doesn't like the chisel."

"Then we should have brought twelve crosses," Mathias muttered, dragging himself forward until he could lean his forehead against the sledge’s rear upright. His splinted leg was crooked at a terrible angle, the wool wrappings soaked through with an oily, brown serum that had frozen into a stiff crust where it touched the air. "We should have stripped the churchyard at Chur and piled the iron on top of it. Thomas, my leg has stopped aching."

Thomas looked at him. "That is the cold, Mathias. That is only the ice taking the bone."

"No," the cripple said, and for the first time his voice had no fear in it, only a strange, dull weariness that was worse than screaming. "It isn't cold. It feels like someone has poured a jug of warm milk down the marrow. It’s sweet, Thomas. It feels like the hearth at the third watch, when the alder logs have turned to white embers and you can put your boots right onto the stones without burning the leather."

"Do not let him sleep," Thomas said to the boy, seizing Luc by the ear and twisting it until the lad gasped with pain. "Keep your fingers in his hair, Luc. If he closes his eyelids, pull until the skin comes away. If Mathias sleeps now, we'll be hauling two bundles down the moraine instead of one."

Luc nodded dumbly, his swollen, loaf-like hands reaching out to clutch the wool of Mathias’s sleeve. He did not pull the hair, but he set his teeth into the shoulder of the cripple’s sheepskin, biting down like an angry terrier until Mathias swore a foul, round oath that smelled of the low-country river-docks.

"Get into the traces," Thomas ordered.

They took up the hemp again. The rope was wet now, soaked with that strange, oily exudate from the split in the canvas, and it left a yellow, greasy smudge on the gray wool of their mittens that did not freeze, even as the wind screamed through the rock-throat with the force of an unbottled mill-dam.

They slipped through the Wolf’s Jaws one by one.

Below the gap, the world changed its face. The great white amphitheater of the Blackhorn was cut off behind them by the jagged teeth of the schist ridge, but what lay ahead was no more welcoming than the ice-fields they had left.

The lower tongue did not slope gently toward the meadows. It ended in a vast, shattered ruin of dead ice and gray shale that the brothers called the Devil’s Shallows. Here, the glacier had died against the limestone spurs of the lower valley forty years ago, leaving a waste of dry, kettle-hole depressions, stagnant bogs frozen into iron hummocks, and heaps of rotting pine that had been uprooted by the great slide during the winter of the three emperors.

The air was thicker here, heavy with the flat, greasy smell of dead bogs and water that had been trapped beneath the ice until it had turned to vinegar. A pale, yellow haze hung over the tree-line—not the clean, white fog of the high ridges, but a curdled, sulfurous steam that seemed to rise from the very stones of the moraine.

"The sun is gone," Father Christian said, looking through the slit of his hood toward the western ridge.

The sky was not black, but that dead, bruised slate-color that comes over the Grisons when the northern gale meets the humid air of the Italian lakes. A few small, dry flakes were beginning to drift down now—not falling from the clouds, but spinning horizontally through the air like scraps of torn parchment.

"Two hours to the chapel," Thomas said, testing the trace across his breast. The pain in his sternum was gone now, replaced by that same dull, throbbing weight that had settled into his palms. "If the path holds through the dwarf-pines, we will be on the slate before the third bell."

"There will be no bell," Mathias whispered. He was walking now with a strange, jerky limp, leaning so hard upon the sledge that the wood groaned beneath his ribs. "The bells are only for Christians, Thomas. We left the Christians behind when we crossed the high chimney."

"Be quiet, Mathias," Thomas said.

"Martin knew it," the cripple continued, his eyes fixed on the gray distance where the chapel roof should have been visible among the pines. "That was why he didn't use the Latin when he laid the wax. He used the sheep-talk. The words the carters use when they're hauling a dead horse out of a lime-pit. Did you hear him, Christian? You were holding the book, but you weren't reading. You were just moving your mouth to keep your lips from freezing together."

Father Christian did not answer. He set his face into the drift, his crampons biting into the lower ice with the same dull, mechanical rhythm: crunch, slide, crunch.

Behind them, the track they had made was already vanishing. It was not the wind that filled the ruts; the ice itself seemed to be rising behind the runners, the gray crust swelling up to smooth out the scars their iron had carved. In twenty paces, the trace was gone, leaving the glacier as unbroken and ancient as if no Christian foot had ever ventured above the tree-line.

And from beneath the oilskin, through the iron pin that pinned the rowan to the larch bed, came the slow, steady sound of the drop.

Drop.

It fell upon the ash timber with the regularity of an iron clock in a city tower, measuring out the remaining cubits of the ice, step by frozen step, down toward the dead valley where no chimney was smoking.

Would you like the summary of Chapter 3: A Count of Remaining Lanterns?