The eastern railway trench was forty feet deep, carved through the solid limestone strata of the valley bench by royal blast-engineers fifty years before the sky went black.
Its sheer upright rock faces, damp with weeping groundwater and stained with half a century of coal soot, rose like canyon walls on either side of the twin track lines. At the top of the trench, iron railings and telegraph wire brackets hung useless and unthreaded in the sulfur mist. Along the base, two feet of packed dark rock ballast formed a raised roadbed flanked by twin stonework drainage under-road drains.
Len Vey walked at the head of the file with Ivara Quill. His boots fell in the rhythmic, five-stride rhythm of a mountain carrier who had paced hundreds of leagues of high turnpike.
With every stride, his Level Five Road Sense sent a nonstop, tactile stream of load-bearing feedback up through his boot soles. The limestone bed beneath the ties was solid, massive stone, and undisturbed by fault lines. The ballast was dry, coarse, and firm. And the unmapped channel networks that had honeycombed the lower wards were absent here on the raised bench.
In his breast pocket, resting flat against his ribs beside his heart, lay the folded, oilcloth-wrapped pages of his sister Cira’s letter. Proof from the outside world that the war engine had ended eleven years ago. Beside the letter lay the heavy, round iron shift token of Master Quarryman Torin Marr, cold and dense against his chest.
