The sound of galloping hooves clattering across the wet limestone rim echoed down the central access shaft with the wild, uneven rhythm of an impending rout.
Two minutes later, a messenger from the Gate Ward burst onto the intermediate narrow high walkway of Level Five, his horse having been left lathered and trembling at the upper derrick staging. The messenger was Corin Petch’s senior office clerk, a thin, middle-aged man named Kessel, wearing a mud-spattered town coat of dark wool and round wire-rimmed glasses held to his ears by greasy twine.
Kessel stumbled across the wet spruce planks, his thin leather shoes slipping repeatedly on the lime slurry that coated the boards. In his right hand, he clutched a heavy brass dispatch metal tube, out of which projected a rolled tube of yellow office thick parchment sealed with red country wax.
“Courier Vey!” Kessel gasped, his chest heaving wildly as if his lungs were choked with coal smoke. “The Gate guard post is breaking! Word has reached the southern outer edge that the Quarry has hoisted the Red Triangle! The guards believe the entire regional restoration plan has collapsed! Captain Vane is preparing to break the transit canopy and evacuate six hundred guard post families into the northern farmland before midnight!”
