Book One – Chapter 2

Yves climbed with measured pace and steady struggle. His boots slipped against the unstable skin of sand, glass and stone. The incline grew progressively steeper, and nothing held. Each of his steps loosened shallow cascades of blackened grit and pale shards that hissed around his ankles and clattered down the slope behind him, sometimes for several seconds after he had stopped moving. The noise measured the stain of his passage more faithfully than altitude did. For every three meters he climbed, he slid one back down.

The pain in his feet was horrible. On level ground, Yves had reverted to that weird sort of stomping gait in which he let his legs do all the work while he kept his feet rigidly stiff, so that they would move as little as possible within the boots. It had been awkward and annoying, but it had somewhat lessened the strain. Here, the incline made that strategy impossible. Every foothold shifted. Every backward slide dragged the open wounds beneath his feet against the interior of his boots. His ankles flexed to compensate and his toes constantly cramped or drove forwards against the dry, coarse leather. It felt as though his skin had been scraped away to the bone. Yves had not unlaced or removed his boots for weeks. There was no point. Socks stretched smooth would gather into folds again within minutes. Sand shaken out would find its way back beneath his soles almost immediately, accompanied by fresh grit and ever finer splinters of glass. Worse, his feet had become so swollen that Yves knew perfectly well that if he took the boots off now, he would never get himself to force them back on again. At this stage, the leather was the only thing that still held his feet together.