She could from this perch have drawn an arrow, aimed north, let it fly, and watched it arc down several long moments later at the place where the bridge gripped the bedrock of the Knot. From there it reached far out across the Chasm to the nearer of the two gatehouses. The opposite—which she had seen earlier from another vantage point—resumed on the far side of the break and led to the top of the glacier. This was alive with silent distant lightning, as if the whole fury of the Evertempest had been poured down upon one small target. The light shattered her vision and obliged her to instead look down at closer things. “This way!” she called to those coming up behind her. “But you’ll need to find another path round.” It was out of the question for Edda to climb what she had climbed.

The Chasm was not a straight ditch; it forked and curved like a canyon. Beyond the near terminus of the Broken Bridge, a branch of it split off and curved aside toward the Knot. Running parallel to that was a road, meandering somewhat, but on the whole cutting south across the Anvil Plain. Its first few paces were exposed to the sky and buried in snow, but beyond that it cut through an old rampart of stones and ducked under the shelter of the mountain range and so ran over bare ground. It was too cold here for any plants to grow. Instead of vegetation the road ran among scraps of iron, slag heaps, unfinished chain links, rusted and broken-down wagons, and mounds of coal next to forges that eons ago had gone cold and dark. For El’s legions clearly had not seen any point in tidying up after themselves when they had completed their great work and retreated across the bridge. Notable was a huge curving plate, roughly triangular but evidently forged as one segment of a dome. This was simply leaning up against a cliff as if some giant had propped it up there to cool off and forgotten about it. Not far beyond it, the road, and the Chasm’s side fork, ran out of view. She had to move sideways a little distance in order to see what gave the Anvil Plain its name: the truncated stump of what had once been a stone crag. El himself had cut it down and flattened its top to make a surface against which his giant smiths could beat out metal. Lying next to it were a hammer and tongs, sized to match.

She felt a bit of a letdown that she could not actually view the Fastness from right here. But the enormous works and discarded pieces of iron that she could see were proof that it could not be much farther away, once they got to the Anvil Plain.