The Long Stairs

Day Seven

It was about time.

Penny's gaze peeled away from the ominous ridgelines and the cobalt-colored sky. The disheveled surface of broken scrub and stunted trees, the twilight world of Gloom fading away endlessly from the Gallows. She'd never thought this week would end.

Penny listened to the rumble of the wheels, and from behind her the rhythmic rattle of the wagon carrying supplies and the surviving canaries. They were crawling westward along the pass where a natural shelf of rock served as the end of the Gallows. This is no road. Penny snickered. A ledge or trail, maybe. But road it was not. The last of the dark forests fell away as the wagon continued it's labored climb higher through the mountainous country.

She knew that she'd arrived when the road slammed up against a soaring face of barren rock that served as a makeshift buffer separating the borderlands from the Gloom. The sun disappeared suddenly as a sheer wall of smooth stone loomed to Penny's left, the narrow road falling away to a steep cliff on right right. The wagon passed a flock of sheep working the tufts of sparse grass, their bleats and tinkling bells echoing in the still, late afternoon air. As they rounded the last switchback turn in the road, she got her first look at the stronghold. A castle in miniature, the slab of stone was spartan and purposeful in its build.

She gazed at the keep, studying it. The bastions towered above the western wall of pass. Granite block, perhaps fifty-feet high, melted seemlessly into the mountainside at the keep's rear—the work of man and nature as one. Beneath sleek walls, ran a deep gorge. Penny could hear the roaring river, though she could not see it. But the most striking feature of the small fortress was the solitary tower that jutted skyward, at least 150 feet from its notched parapet to precipice below.

The road widened as they swung farther around the final bend, the wagon neared a makeshift village nestled at the foot of the keep. Just beyond the last of the building, the road ended at the edge of the gorge. From there a timbered causeway supported by stone columns spanned the crevasse, providing the keep's sole access to the outside world. The only other means of entry were to climb up the mountainsides and then scale the smooth stone walls—an impossible task.

Penny assessed the strategic values of the keep. It made for an excellent watchpost. The village and pass would be in plain view from the tower; and from the keep's walls a few dozen men could hold off an entire horde of enemies indefinitely. Not that she was a military expert.

She returned her focus back to hardscrabble camp of Folly growing like a festering wound beneath the walls. That wasn't its given name. But it stuck nonetheless. The edge of the world was the last place one expected to find, say, a small city. Yet as Penny could see, somebody obviously decided it was the perfect spot to set such a macabre outpost.

All these places had fanciful names such as Steadfast, Promise, Cocksure, Motherlode, and Redemption. Here was Bliss. That was how the Trumps liked to sell it to the masses. While the rabble countered with derogatory epithets like Malice, Spendthrift, Gravestone, Capricious, and Squander. For those not slogging through the shit, Bliss was aptly named. To the unprivileged and indentured Folly served them better—the towers of the keep lost in shadow, a silent sentinel looking out to nowhere.

As the wagon followed the road, which split the village down the middle. A dirty haze rested low, just above the building tops that ran out into the sky in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Folly, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the place resting at the end of the line.

"Well," the leper said to Penny as the wagon came to a halt, "what do you think of your new home?"

"The same as the others I've been to," Penny answered. "Not much. If you've seen one, you've seen 'em all."