I blink, concerned that I’m seeing things. I’ve been feeling dizzy and feverish for most of the day, and I know I’m terribly dehydrated. But as we draw nearer, the image remains unchanged. I stare, slack-jawed, marveling at the ingenuity of it all. I’m not sure how people managed to raise these wall-clinging structures, but there’s no denying that it’s impressive.

Soon we’re slipping beneath idle flags that mark the mouth of the canyon and entering the pass. Just behind the flags is a raised iron gate, its post ends sharpened to spikes. I shiver when I picture the gate coming down, cutting off the passageway. This is not a place I’d want to be trapped.

Huts and shanties are built along the canyon’s base, serving as the foundation for the walkways that climb the surrounding walls. A blacksmith’s tool clangs somewhere in the distance. When I tilt my head back and look up through the wagon’s cage, I spot gunners along the rim line, scarves wrapped over their mouths and gunpowder satchels slung across their shoulders. Their modified rifles sweep the chasm as our wagon creeps forward.

I understand now why this place is called the Barrel. We are the bullet, moving through the barrel of a gun. There is only one course of travel, and it cannot be altered. I envy the falcon I spot flying high overhead, sunlight cutting through its wingtips.

The pass widens and eventually opens onto a bustling oblong clearing. Here, traders have set up a market, their wares spread over their mules and displayed in their rickshaws. There are more permanent structures too—booths and tables stocked with textiles, baking goods, leather. Pens of chickens and livestock. Pale canopies provide shelter for the sellers, who squabble with buyers over price.

I’ve never seen a settlement so big. This can’t have cropped up recently. The complexity of the walkways and the bridges that span the pass, the scale of the market, and the sheer number of wares . . . This place has been growing for years, and it seems impossible that our pack never heard of it.

Nestled in the shadows, behind the bustling market and against the mesa wall, sits a ramshackle shanty with a faded cloth door. A blitzed-looking man staggers from within, blinking in the afternoon sun, and I wonder if this place might be the Vulture’s Roost that Asher mentioned.

Bain and Cree set the yoke down across from the maybe pub, just outside a particularly unstable looking shanty. Like the Vulture’s Roost, it has a threadbare cloth door and leans into the rock walls like a weary vagrant. The uneven boards that make up the siding sport ugly gaps, and the roof is a series of decaying wooden planks that look as brittle as old cornhusks.