Len Vey shifted his weight onto the heels of his boots. He felt the rough, unbending granite of the terrace flat stone slabs through the worn double-layer leather of his soles.
The leather was thin. The outer soles had been re-pegged three weeks ago in the northern staging village of Redstone. He used dried birch pegs and boiled beef animal fat. But eight days of sprinting through flooded limestone drain pits. He climbed ballast embankments. Then he slid down grease-coated drainage chutes had ground the treads smooth as river pebbles. His left heel-counter was cracked where an iron track tie had struck it in the Tram rail yard. The stitching around the toe caps was stiff with dried lime slurry.
Through those thin, scarred soles, his Road Sense mapped the load-bearing anatomy of the mountain beneath his feet.
He could feel the thickness of the granite terrace, four inches of dressed flat stone slab laid over a six-inch bed of crushed quartz ballast. He could feel the cold, hollow void of the backup cooling chimney pipes twenty feet below, where unvented mountain drafts whistled through rusted iron damper gates. And deeper still, sixty feet down in the solid mountain stone, he could feel the rhythmic, bone-shaking of the central dynamos feeding Chancellor Morn’s high-pressure storage batteries.
