Chapter 8 - The Ascent Through the Cleft
The chimney was a vertical graveyard of ice and loose stone.
Gideon went first, driving his hunting knife into the frozen earth and compacted snow between the rocks to secure a handhold before hauling his weight upward. Every muscle in his arms screamed, the old bullet wound in his shoulder pulling tight like a strained bowstring. Below him, the wind roared through the canyon, carrying the faint, distant echo of shouts from the trail below.
Isaac and Voss’s men had reached the shelf. They had found the abandoned horses.
“Keep moving, Leah,” Wya’s voice came from just below Gideon’s boots, steady and low. “Place your foot where mine was. Do not look down.”
“I’m right behind you,” Leah’s voice answered, breathless but controlled.
Gideon reached a small, wind-scoured ledge about fifty feet above the trail and pulled himself up, sprawling flat on his belly against the granite. He rolled over quickly, unslung his Sharps, and jammed the butt against a boulder as a makeshift rest.
Below them, three figures had appeared at the mouth of the fissure.
Even from fifty yards up, Gideon recognized the bulky, thick-shouldered silhouette of Vance, his arm still bound in a makeshift sling from the blow Wya had delivered with the iron bar. Beside him stood Isaac Puit, pointing frantically up toward the dark cleft in the rock face.
“They found the trail!” Isaac shouted, his voice carrying up the stone chimney like a tin horn. “They went up the chimney!”
Vance unholstered a heavy revolver, squinting upward through the swirling snow. He couldn't see Gideon or the women hidden in the deep shadows of the ledge, but he knew the direction.
“Flush them out!” Vance roared to the two men behind him. “Don't let them reach the plateau!”
A bullet cracked against the granite wall two feet to Gideon’s left, sending a stinging spray of rock chips across his face.
Gideon didn't flinch. He exhaled slowly, letting his breath feather out into the cold air, and centered the brass sight of the Sharps on the slab of rock directly above Vance’s head.
He squeezed the trigger.
The rifle roared, the heavy black-powder charge shaking the ledge and filling the narrow cleft with the sharp stench of sulfur. The bullet smashed into the overhang above Vance, dislodging a massive sheet of frozen shale and packed snow that crashed down directly onto the ledge where the pursuers stood.
Isaac shrieked as a slab of ice clipped his shoulder, knocking him backward into the snow. Vance cursed furiously, ducking behind a boulder as a second avalanche of loose rock tumbled down the chute.
“Gideon!” Wya’s voice called out from below. “Leah is up! Keep climbing!”
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Gideon didn't wait to see if Vance recovered. He levered a fresh cartridge into the breech, backed away from the ledge into the shadow of the cleft, and scrambled upward on hands and knees until his fingers finally closed around the flat, windswept rocks of the southern plateau.
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