The tool shed on Tier Two was built like a castle designed to withstand a siege of falling stone.
Its walls were assembled from dry-laid, squared limestone headers two feet thick, fitted together with the tongue-and-groove care of master masons so that not a single ounce of lime mortar had been needed to seal the joints. The low-pitched roof was built from massive baulks of hand-hewn white pine, pinned directly into the living granite face of the cliff with three-inch wrought-iron tie-rods that groaned softly whenever the air-flow drafts surged through the pit.
Inside, the air was dense, warm, and humid. He smelled of melted animal fat dips, steeped chicory tea, hot forge iron, and the sharp, acidic tang of sulfur flux used to braze drilling bits.
Foreman Geth Marr stood behind a drafting table fashioned from a huge cedar log split down the heartwood.
He was fifty years old, built with the thick, unmoving mass of a pit pony. His shoulders so was wide they seemed to brush the stone doorposts whenever he turned. His thick forearms, bare to the elbows and coated in gray rock dust, were corded with ropes of sinew and pitted with hundreds of tiny, dark blue speckles. The permanent tattoo of flying limestone shrapnel that marked every man who had swung a sledge against a stuck jumper steel. A stiff black leather patch covered his left eye, secured by a greasy rawhide cord. His leftover right eye was bloodshot, watery with chronic dust inflammation…
