Chapter 1830 My Fucking Duty & Service:>Ep40

• The road reached the foot of the mountain, which had been slashed and gouged through with a perilous switchback that took them roughly a third of the way to the peak. Up this close to the mountain, the bottom of the shelf was visible, though not the entrance itself. Decades ago, long before Lenna had first visited, there'd been a much larger and more regally appropriate ramp up the slope, the kind you could lead a proper funeral procession along with a crowd of retainers standing shoulder to shoulder. But dozens of individual excavations, combined with a blight of grave robbers mouseholing between tombs destabilized the pathway, causing a landslide that had stranded the entrance to the mountain redoubt for months. The switchback had been cut in its place, leaving barely enough room for their carriage going around hairpin turns over a crushed aggregate of rocks, dirt, and forgotten kings.
• As they neared the lip of the shelf, above the whipping of the wind, Lenna thought she heard something. She quieted a conversation she'd been having with Crys with a gesture. The cabin fell silent, allowing her to focus on the sounds. Snatches of speech caught by the wind. The longer they stayed silent, the more noises they could pick out. Fluttering of cloth caught in a breeze. Laughter. Metal clanking on metal.
• Lenna wordlessly left the carriage, tapping the side to get the driver's attention. Krue brought the carriage to a halt, keeping his hands on the reins and one eye on the steep fall off the switchback besides them. Crys joined her moments later, motioning for the pair of guards at the rear to tie their mounts to the rail at the back of the carriage and form up with her on foot.