The descent down the hoist shaft of the Quarry Ward was fifty arm-lengths of whistling drafts, squealing cable drums, and freezing limestone mist that smelled of sulfur and wet cement.
The iron hoist cage—a skeletal box of riveted angle-iron and punched holes in floorplates—dropped through the darkness with a heavy, rhythmic shudder every time the guide shoes passed a bolted timber fishplate. Len Vey stood in the center of the cage. His good right hand gripped the oily mid-air cable to steady himself. His left arm was held rigid in its linen sling against the jarring shaking. Beside him, Ivara Quill held her hooded copper lantern low, its narrow beam lighting up the massive, scarred shoulders of Foreman Geth Marr and the heavy leather apron of Melli Dorn, who carried the eighteen-inch bronze valve wheel balanced across her thighs.
They stepped off the cage at Tier Four.
The drift was cold—forty-eight degrees by the brass mine heat gauge mounted on the hanging wall—and the sulfur fog was thick. It curled in greasy tendrils around the legs of the timber props.
They walked forty paces along the haulage track to the breach in the granite wall.
The four-foot bonded limestone stonework that Geth’s masons had laid two hours earlier stood solid, iron-hard, and flush with the surrounding stone. The water-setting mortar had already set into a dull, battleship-gray skin, and along the lower course, the blister-copper wedges remained locked beneath heavy lead caps that showed no sign of sweating or heat…
