Foreman Geth Marr stood over the shattered fragments of the one-inch carbon steel pry-bar, his sixteen-pound sledge resting vertically between the toes of his heavy boots.
The air in the southern drift of Tier Four was thick with gray limestone dust and the sharp, nauseating stench of scorched lead and battery acid. Five paces away, Jarek sat propped against a dry-laid wooden props wall while Edda—her own broken right hand bound to her apron with a strip of linen—used a greasy cotton rag to wash the lime slurry from the driller’s crushed, blackened calf. Jarek was shivering wildly from shock, but his teeth were clamped around a piece of folded leather. He refused to cry out in front of the younger apprentices.
Bram Ash knelt beside Jarek, unbuckling the crushed iron shin guards with his uninjured left hand. The three-sixteenths-inch rolled iron plate had taken the main impact of the three-ton slab, creasing down the center line like a pinched stovepipe. But the metal had held its solid strength. Beneath the iron, the skin of Jarek’s shin was swollen, purple, and weeping clear serous fluid through crushed pores, but when Bram pressed his thumb against the driller’s ankle, the pedal pulse was steady and rhythmic.
