The mountain did not want a road.
Dalga Ironvein had spent forty-one of her sixty-two years arguing with stone, and she could tell the difference between rock that yielded and rock that resisted. The Thornwall's eastern approach was the second kind — a sheer granite face that had been saying no to erosion for a geological age and was not about to start saying yes to a Dwarf with a surveyor's chain and a grudge.
She stood at the base of the eastern approach and looked up. Seven hundred meters of grey-black granite, streaked with quartz veins that caught the morning sun like white scars. The proposed route — a corridor through the Thornwall range to connect the Sovereign Dominion with the Korthane Hegemony's eastern trade roads — would need to punch through eighty-seven kilometers of this. Straight through. The only direction the mountain hadn't considered.
