The work boss’s office was an uncompromising cube of white baked-clay tile, ten feet on each side, lit up only by the olive beam of the copper-hooded lantern Bram held in the doorway.
The room was furnished with austere, office smooth speed. In the center stood a heavy desk made from folded tiny sheet iron, painted with the same lead-gray enamel used on military ammunition lockers. Behind the desk sat an unpainted straight-backed pine chair, its four legs bolted directly into the ash floorboards with leaded iron brackets to prevent the furniture from shifting during ground-shaking shocks from the lower quarry blasting.
On the metal blotter sat an unlit glass kerosene lamp, its chimney furred with twenty years of cold soot, an empty cast-iron inkwell rusted to its saucer. A heavy brass paperweight cast in the shape of a twelve-faceted shield generator housing.
Along the western wall stood three rows of upright iron filing cabinets, four drawers high, their enameled faces stenciled with white town numbers: 01-A through 12-D.
Ivara Quill didn’t look at the desk or the paperweight. She walked directly to the filing cabinets, her land-mapper’s eyes sweeping the brass label-holders.
The brass locks in the drawer handles were rusted through green with copper carbonate, their tumblers frozen in place by decades of undisturbed damp. Ivara turned to Geth Marr, who had followed them down the tiled hall, his massive frame nearly filling the seven-foot doorway. The quarry foreman was carrying a four-foot iron pinch-bar he had picked…
