Three men Orsfin Ironblood knew climbed the frozen peaks for heartmetal. None came back. One of them swung a pick beside Orsfin on the lower ridge for two winters, and Orsfin buried the man's tools himself when spring failed to return him. Now Orsfin stood at the village edge with a pack on his back and nine feet of red-haired bulk between the cold and his choice. He meant to climb where the others died and bring back the ore that does not break. He meant to forge an axe from it. He carried a map he had bought from a trapper two seasons back. It showed a single peak with three sites marked in a triangle, each circled and crossed out by a different hand. Failed digs. Dead men's notes. Orsfin had studied the map through two winters of preparation, and he believed the survivors of those expeditions had narrowed the search for him. He would start where they had stopped. He also carried a slab of slate he had cut and scored himself. Into it he had chiseled the marks of every ice pattern he had learned to read: the blue veins that meant hollow beneath, the milky bands that meant rock close behind, the hairline fractures that ran toward ore. A miner reads stone. Orsfin had taught himself to read ice the same way, and the slate was his proof and his guide. He tied it inside his coat against his ribs. He climbed for nine days. He reached the first marked site on the east face and dug until his pick rang on dead granite. He traversed to the second site on the south slope and dug through a drift to find only more drift. He climbed two more days to the third, the highest mark, and found a shaft already sunk and already empty. He sat in the wind beside the empty shaft and ate frozen bread and understood that the dead men had not narrowed anything. They had only proved where the heartmetal was not. A small four-armed squirrel watched him from a rock, then leapt away across snow no man's boot had pressed. Orsfin pulled the slate from his coat. He turned his back on the triangle of failures and faced the unmarked west ridge, where blue veins ran under a sheet of clear ice and milky bands cut behind it in a pattern that matched two of his chiseled marks at once. He drove his pick into the snow at his feet to mark the spot. The trapper's map he folded once and pushed deep into his pack. From here he would carry only his own.

Orsfin drove his pick into the west ridge before dawn and dug through ice the color of old glass. By midmorning the slate against his ribs felt warm with promise. The blue veins ran deeper than at any of the failed sites. He had cut two feet down when the wind changed. The sky above the peak turned the color of bruised iron. Fog rolled up the slope in thick ropes and swallowed the ridge below him. Then the hail came. Stones the size of his fists struck the rock around him and cracked the ice he had just opened. The wind spun the fog and hail together into a churning column that climbed the mountain. Orsfin shouldered his pack and ran. A hailstone struck his shoulder and dropped him to one knee. Another split the wood of his pick handle. He saw a dark slit in the rock face above a snow shelf and made for it. The opening was too narrow. Orsfin shoved his shoulder against the rock and felt it give a finger's width. He braced his boots and pushed again. Stone scraped his coat and tore his sleeve. He could not fit through with the pack on his back. He dropped it in the snow beside the opening, shoved his shoulders through the gap, and dragged himself inside. His axes, his tent, his food, his medkit, the slate — all of it sat outside in the storm, half-buried already. He turned back toward the slit and watched the hail bury the straps. The cavern was cold and black past arm's length. Wind poured through the opening behind him and found other openings deeper in. The howling doubled and tripled as it moved through the hollow, louder inside than out. Orsfin set his back against the wall and listened. Something in the dark was not wind. A slow scrape of weight on stone, far back where his eyes could not reach. He drew the short knife from his belt — the only blade he had carried on his body — and faced the dark. The storm had taken his gear. The cavern had taken his retreat. Whatever shared the dark with him would have to be met with eight inches of steel and nothing else.