Shadow and Steel

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His toes slipped an inch, then two. The cliff’s rough face scraped over his bare chest. Leitos clawed his way onto a ledge no wider than his palm. Rock crumbled. He grasped wildly at empty handfuls of night. A shout climbed up his throat-

— and became a grunt when the fingers of one hand caught the edge of a shallow crack. The jolting halt wrenched his shoulder, and he bit back a groan. He quickly reached up with his free hand and secured a firmer hold. A hundred feet below, barely seen for the darkness, the Sea of Sha’uul crashed over boulders draped with seaweed. The wind sang a haunting song as it passed over the island the Brothers of the Crimson Shield called Witch’s Mole.

Leitos turned his attention to climbing the cliff. The wan moonlight of the Sleeping Widow showed him many knobs and outcrops dotting the face of the sandstone cliff.

Picking a likely route, he swung his feet to a narrow lip, and then inched his fingers along the crack until he stood upright. He gulped a few deep breaths, willed his heart to beat slower, then stabbed his toes into a shallow fracture. Secure as he could hope to be, he reached overhead, and let his fingers seek like blind worms until they crawled over a stony ridge. He gave the lip a little of his weight, then more. It held. Repeating those movements, he resumed his ascent.

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