The nursery feeder drift smelled of wet lime plaster, stale drainage water. The thin, bitter-salt chill of stone that had not seen draft air in seven years. It was an old extraction tunnel, four feet wide at the haunches and arched with dry-stacked dark rock, cut back. Just then, the quarry masters still believed the lower limestone beds would yield building blocks instead of bitter water. Over thirty winters, the seep from the upper agricultural terraces had leached through the bedding planes, depositing thick ribs of yellow white lime-chalk that clung to the ceiling timbers like sheep fat.
Len Vey moved through the drift with his boots planted carefully on the broken ballast. His left arm was lashed across his ribs in two flat splints of seasoned ash. It was wrapped in gray wool banding that Doma Reel had soaked in boiled vinegar and salt to draw the heat from the compound fracture. Every time his heel came down with too much weight on the shifting shale, the jagged ends of the radius rubbed together under the linen. It sent a sharp, sick throb up into his collarbone that tasted like copper filings on the back of his tongue. He carried a six-foot pine pole in his right hand. He used the iron shodding at its tip to sound each flat stone slab before he put his boots upon it.
