Neyra has both her hands clasped tightly around a long, oval iron rod about as thick as a man's wrist. It feels cold to the touch and this is because the expansive, arched rock chamber that rises above her is also cold. Her fingers flex around the metal and tighten again until her knuckles become white. She does this because the rod, which was once some form of truss or support for a colossal bridge, is the only thing stopping her from plummeting into an ocean of darkness.
When she looks down beyond her pitiful, dangling feet she sees an impossibly large, infinitely patient inky-black maw that is ready to swallow her life whole in one casual gulp. Above her, an uneven rocky edifice rises about a meter. It is too far for her to reach up to and, despite being rough and uneven, stubbornly refuses to present any handholds. Neyra, even though she is a surprisingly strong and physically fit person, cannot lift herself up whilst she is so heavily laden. She would be able to fumble with some straps and shed some of her excess baggage had she the courage to let go of what is rapidly becoming her new best friend, but trusting all this weight to just one of her arms isn't too appealing right now. So instead, Neyra is just hanging around.
Wedged rather uncomfortably between her belt and her belly is a double-barrelled flintlock pistol which fires metal shot of about half an inch in diameter. She finds that, as long as the weather is not damp, this is an extremely dependable tool. Earlier today, she used it to shoot a man. The bullet shattered two of his ribs, tore a hole in his lung and made a nest inside his chest cavity where it remained as he crawled away and died.
Slung over her shoulder is an empty quiver. Neyra's bow is somewhere up there, dropped during the earlier fracas, along with her dagger. Her wineskin is still slung across her other shoulder, but it hangs empty, its contents having long since drained away down one of her legs. A near-miss from the blade of an axe sliced its bottom clean off and now the only water Neyra carries has collected in the heel of her boot, soothing a large blister she has there, not that it's really the biggest of her problems right now. All these items that she possesses and all the money that bloats her purse are utterly useless to her.
Her breath billows out of her mouth into the chilly, inert air around her, before dissipating in an enviable escape. Twisting her head as much as she can, she spots another couple of similar rods poking out from the rock face, all of them far too distant to reach. Had she been somewhat more blessed when the Gods had been handing out ambition, enthusiasm, dexterity or stupidity then she might try to swing herself onto another one of these rods. Each one juts out from the rock in an act of rigid defiance and would serve as a fine statement of the triumph of engineering over nature if the bridge they had once supported hadn't yielded to the twisting and bucking of an earthquake sixty one years ago. Enshrouded in darkness, the remains of the other end of bridge are barely visible, considerably more iron trusses bursting forth out of another brown, featureless ledge of rock.
Jared appears. His head inches slowly and deliberately over the edge of the rock face until his chin is about level with the edge of the ledge he is laying upon. Jared has a deep-seated, intense dread of heights and is, at present, dizzy with a fear that he will somehow slip and fall. Nevertheless, this is nothing against the love and dedication he feels toward his best friend and the sight of her, her life very plainly clenched tightly between her fingers, crams yet more panic into every remaining space in his mind. He jumps to his feet and very nearly does slip and fall.
Thirty seconds ago he was mulling over the events of her death. He had always known that there was a chance that he or her might have to face the death of the other and, for a few moments, he felt thankful he had not had to watch her die before him. Then it occurred to him that, as these thoughts rushed through his mind, she might still be alive, whole seconds of her existence remaining before it was dashed across whatever stone formed the base of this frigid, underground canyon. The most terrible thoughts had assailed him; Neyra was still alive and yet nothing and nobody would be able to save her. Her life would end and it would be as if he were watching with a spyglass from afar, utterly powerless.
Then he had heard the squeak and the gasp. Eight fingers, two thumbs and one blood-flecked shower of mousy-brown hair were both an immeasurable relief but also a terrible shock. Neyra now tilts her head up towards him, seeing that there is still blood running from his forehead but that much of it has now congealed in his stubble. She can only bring herself to release another gasp of air, some of it condensing on the iron rod above her.
She hears him scrabbling above her and this is followed by a faint slapping sound. She guesses, correctly, that this is the sound of a coil of rope landing on the floor. Jared is practical and always counts a length of thick, reliable rope amongst his possessions. Neyra also knows that Jared is, relatively speaking at least, a wimp. Should he be foolish enough lower a rope for her to clutch at, her weight would surely pull him down into the abyss alongside her, allowing it to consume twice as many people.
Nevertheless, the rope duly appears, dangling in front of her face as welcome to her as the udder of a dutiful cow, before slapping itself against the rock face an arm's length away. She glares at it and shouts upward, but a glance rewards her with no sight of Jared. She can hear sound of rope dragging across rock.
"You know you can't pull me up, find something to tie the rope around."
The reply is quivering. "Don't you fucking fall. I'll climb down and find your body and beat the shit out of it if you do. I'll piss on your face too." It's a coarse reply with no intelligence behind it. Jared is frightened out of his wits and reverts to base, unthinking humour. "I... I can't find anything to tie it to! The rocks are all too low!"
He's right, too. There is barely anything larger than a jagged molehill within fifty feet and Jared knows that a lasso around any of these pitiful geological embarrassments is not likely to hold. He has no intention of taking such a stupid risk and anyway, the sharp, almost crystalline structure of these small mounds, dozens of which dot the ground about him, might well cut a rope snagged across them.
Jared's eyes scan the ground before him for anything else he can employ. The body of a fallen man, most of his pelvis and lower torso lacerated by the sword that is now sheathed at Jared's side. A shining glaive, a weapon which mounts a sharp blade on the end of a polearm, is clenched tightly in his lifeless grasp. A few meters beyond the man is Neyra's discarded dagger, her bow a little further still. A second man, also quite dead, is all asprawl over two particularly sharp clumps of rock. His back is punctured and his eyes glare upward, unable to see how the pool of blood below him is growing outward in a languid, mesmerising manner. This one is still warm.
Jared hurriedly searches the first man's body but this soon proves futile; there is little of the man to search. His form, rigid in death, is covered from neck to thigh in a coat of close-weaved mail and there is no room within for him to retain anything useful. The small bag that was hanging from his back contains an apple and few pieces of bread, his belt-pouch a handful of coins and his one pocket a few loose pieces of cloth and a stick of chalk. The man is useless.
The second cadaver, somewhat more rotund and also chain-clad, is that of the man responsible for pitching Neyra into the nearby void and he has even less upon his person. A small axe, earlier swung in a fashion both liberal and lethal, now rests a few centimetres from his bloodied right hand. With this palm turned upward and fingers curled inward, as if mimicking a dead spider, and his arm outstretched as far as it can reach, this man seems to be almost pleading in death. Jared reaches down and drags him from the crimson pool he lays upon, smearing yet more of the ground below him. Turning the corpse and rifling in its pockets yields a sackcloth purse and a half-dozen stubby, slippery candlesticks. And that's it.
Jared straightens his back and kicks the body in disgust, turning back to face the first man. As he does this, his palms press against his temples and his fingers dig into his scalp in trembling desperation.
Then Jared's gaze suddenly returns to the glaive. He quickly kneels and his fingers pry and scrabble at the dead man's digits, working with much speed and little effective application. As they repeatedly fail to free the weapon from the cadaver's algid, stiff grip, images of Neyra dropping like a stone into a pool of oil begin to fill his mind. Abruptly, in one swift move, Jared stands, draws his weapon and brings the blade crashing down upon one of the body's wrists, then the other. Within moments, the weapon is free, albeit with two severed limbs still attached.
Next, he ties the other end of the rope to the middle of the shaft, wrapping the slack around and around it. He lays the weapon between two of the small, rocky stumps that rest a few meters back from the edge of the drop and imagines the downforce on the rope pulling the weapon firmly up against both of them but, hopefully, not over their uneven, slightly spiky surfaces. Nevertheless, each of these stumps is no higher than the top of his boots and so there is a very real risk the polearm might pop loose. Dead Guy Number Two comes in useful here; Jared drags him over the the halberd and, lifting him up by the shoulders, lets all ninety five kilos of flesh, bone and ruptured chainmail slump down onto the glaive.
This entire process takes him no more than a minute, but it is the longest minute he has lived in a very long time. He returns to a position where he can glance down at Neyra again, without placing his feet anywhere near where rock ends and space begins.
The rope snakes down the rock face below him, following its contour as it bulges outwards. It terminates temptingly just where the iron support meets the rock face and Neyra is now inching her way towards it, only content to loosen her grip for a fraction of a second. Her progress is agonisingly to watch but within a minute her hand is brushing against hemp. She glances upward again and this time she locks eyes with him.
"It's secure. Climb it." There is confidence in his voice now and that is a very reassuring thing. She knows that Jared is very good at getting things right. She also knows that it is well within her ability to climb strong rope whilst braced against rock.
First, the fingers of her right hand quickly grasp the sinewy line and then, after a deep breath, she frees herself from the cool iron and twists her body around, her left hand gripping slightly below her right. This causes her body to almost slap against the cliff face and she might well be short of some skin on her knuckles and kneecaps, but it's a welcome trade off for the feel of rough, dependable rope. With a grunt of effort she crawls her knees up the rock until she is able to bend them enough to push the soles of her feet against it. From there, it's hand over hand progress upwards.
Her heart thuds, regardless, and she forgets to breathe until she draws level with the edge of the ledge. She sees Jared sat a few metres away on top of the body of the man who had tried, with a swift kick, to knock her down into darkness. The length of rope runs along the ground and underneath the man, who seems to be laying on top of a weapon that is pulled up against two clusters of spiky rock. The man is keeping the weapon flat on the ground and, to be doubly sure, Jared is using the weight of his own backside to keep the man pinned down too.
Jared pats the corpse on the head, relaxing a little as he sees his friend climb into view. He is about to reach down and wave the stump of one severed wrist, to make some pun about lending a hand, but Neyra speaks before he can.
"That," she says, "is the worst piece of engineering I have ever seen."