Ivara Quill extended her right arm over the stone coaming of the archway. She held the hooded lantern out into the open void.
She turned the knurled bronze collar on the hood, widening the sky-slit until the olive-green flame cast a broad, wedge-shaped beam across the gulf. The light reached twenty yards through the underground mist before dissolving against the sheer, upright face of a dressed limestone cliff edge on the opposite wall.
Below them, opening across two square miles of excavated underground hollow, lay the Quarry Ward. A huge terraced tiered arena carved into the roots of the province over four hundred years of nonstop labor.
It wasn’t a silent pit. Even in the dim twilight of Rookvale’s unending night, the ward hummed with a huge, muffled industry. A thousand tiny copper lamps glimmered on the distant tiers like dying embers in a chimney grate, marking the outer edge railings of residential barracks, tool sheds, and blacksmith shops stacked along the cliff faces. Far below, on the lowest floor where the waste rock was dumped, the darkness was total, thick as wet felt. It pooled in the lowest hollows where no lantern beam could penetrate.
That was the Great Sink: the proposed landing zone for the central release charge.
