Ivara Quill kept her pace locked to three feet per stride. Her boots struck the frost-filmed solid mountain stone with the rhythmic, steady, unrushed pace of an apprentice land-mapper running a chain line through wet scrub. Every three paces, the hardened steel shoe of her sounding pole clicked against the rock—tap, tap, tap—sending a sharp shaking pulse through the dried ash-wood shaft into the palm of her sound right hand.
To an untrained ear, the clicks were merely the nervous habit of a crippled woman feeling her way through mountain mist. To Ivara, they were sound soundings. The granite of the northern ridge was dense. But seventy years of unvented steam lines and high-pressure drainage chimney pipes had cut underground voids beneath the roadbed. A hollow ring meant a six-inch channel ran beneath the stone. A dull thud meant solid bedrock. And a lingering, metal rattle warned of snapped anchor bolts in the retaining wall.
Behind her, Len Vey walked in her wake, his breathing measured and deep. He was nineteen years old, but in the blue back-scatter of Morn’s castle lights, his face had the hollow, gray-carved look of a stonecutter who had spent forty winters underground. His canvas coat was stiff with grease and dried lime slurry from the Quarry sump, the wool at his elbows worn down to the warp threads. His left arm was locked against his ribs by the cedar splints, bound tight with black webbing. But he carried his sounding pole in his right…
