4
Burliton guided us down the long hall. On our left were windows that granted a view of the courtyard, and to our right was a long line of doors. A few of them stood open and I glimpsed several occupied classrooms filled with hard wood desks and dozing pupils with an imperious teacher at the head.
The hall took a turn leftward to surround the courtyard, and in the corner was a staircase that led to a landing before disappearing to the second floor. A door stood beside the stairs, and it was through this that we walked out into the warm light of the late afternoon sun.
A sheer wall of stone loomed before us and stretched some two hundred feet into the sky to stop at the mountain’s craggy top. The stone extended across the entire plateau for five hundred feet in either direction.
Th
