Before Geth Marr allowed a single mule to turn its head toward the Tram Ward surface trench, he led six master stonemasons back down the Number Two hoist shaft to Tier Four.
They didn’t go down as inspectors. They rode the iron hoist cage in heavy, unbroken silence. They were surrounded by the physical weight of four hundred pounds of quick-setting water-setting fiery cement packed in tarred rough rope sacks, six wooden buckets of coarse fiery sand salvaged from the Salt Ward lehrs, and sixty dressed limestone header blocks salvaged from the abutments of the old underground rail bridge. Each block had been squared by hand thirty years ago by veteran stone-cutters, six inches thick, twelve inches broad, and eighteen inches long, weighing fifty pounds of dense, crystal-clear spar that smelled of dry lime and cold iron.
“No lead caps,” Geth told his masons as their heavy clogs struck the lime-slick timber rails of the working drift.
He walked at the head of the file, his sixteen-pound sledge resting across his leather-aproned shoulder, his single bloodshot eye fixed on the rough breach in the four-foot granite solitude wall.
“We’re not leaving a sky-slit that can be pried open with an iron crowbar or burned through with sulfur flux,” Geth continued, his gravelly voice echoing down the limestone hanging wall. “We lay solid bonded stonework from the ash floorboards straight up to the granite roof top door beam. Four feet thick. Tied into the living bedrock with two-inch forged iron cramps…
