Ivara Quill stepped onto the North Rim overhead frame of the Quarry Ward, planting the bronze tip of her sounding pole against the timber decking to steady herself against the howling mountain draft. The overhead frame hung three hundred feet above the pit floor, a huge cantilevered framework of bolted oak timbers and iron tie-rods jutting out over the vast limestone tiered arena that formed the heavy-duty heart of the western district.
Below her, in the great stone bowl, six massive coal-fired flares cast an uneven, smoky orange glare across the stepped terraces. Two thousand miners, stonecutters, and their families lived down there, their homes carved directly into the sheer limestone cliffs in tiers of whitewashed cells connected by narrow wooden narrow high walkways and iron ladders. But tonight, none of the families were sleeping. Crowds of workers in heavy frieze coats were gathered along the lower stone railings, their faces turned toward the center of the pit floor where the coalition’s desperate building gamble was assembled.
In the middle of the limestone basin lay the absorption sink: an acre of perfectly leveled bedrock covered in eight hundred hardened salt-glass heat panels. It shone like black ice under the flaring torches. Each panel was forty-five tiny fractions of an inch thick, cast in Melli Dorn’s reverberatory kilns and heat-softened for forty-eight hours to withstand total heat gradients.
