Melli Dorn knelt on the wet wooden walkway planks at the mouth of the quarry drift, unrolling her canvas tool kit by the dim, shuttered beam of a copper hand-lamp. The wind howling down from the northern cliffs threw fine grains of frozen shale against her heavy canvas trousers, but she paid no attention to the weather. Her mind was focused entirely on the cutting edges of the steel laid out before her.
She picked up her six-pound cross-peen hand sledge. That turned the hickory handle slowly in her thick, scarred palms. The wood was blackened and charred along the throat from ten winters of lifting molten crucibles out of the annealing kilns in the Salt Ward, the surface worn as smooth as polished bone by the friction of her calloused skin. Around the grip, she had bound twelve turns of greasy linen twine, tarred to provide an unbending purchase that wouldn’t slip even when her hands were coated with sulfur grease and condensing boiler moisture.
“I’m not doing this because I have an appetite for crawling through stone sewers, courier,” Melli said without looking up at Len Vey, who stood three paces away with his sounding pole planted in the scree. “At fifty-two years of age, a woman has earned the right to sleep in a warm room with an iron stove and a dry pair of stockings.”
