The Quarry Ward was the deepest wound in the province of Rookvale. For forty years before the war engine had approached, country engineers had blasted and carved this massive limestone tiered arena into the mountain’s roots, extracting the white building stone that paved the capital and the dense dark rock blocks that lined the river weirs.
The twelve-year night fell. Then, Chancellor Morn had converted the pit into the province’s central heat sink and penal labor colony. Twelve hundred men, women, and children lived on the stepped terraces that ringed the digging, their stone hovels clinging to the upright cliffs like swallows’ nests, breathing the lime dust and coal smoke that drifted down from the kilns.
Tonight, every terrace was crowded with silent, watchful figures.
They stood behind the heavy timber blast-screens and dark rock stone retaining walls they had spent three days reinforcing with quarry gravel. They held wet cloths over their children’s faces to shield them from the sulfur steam that billowed up from the sump, their eyes reflecting the blinding, blazing bright dawn that was erupting four hundred feet beneath their homes.
They didn’t cheer. They didn’t shout slogans of victory. They were quarry people. They knew that when forty thousand heat units enter a cold hole in the earth, a single cracked stone or jammed valve turns a celebration into an unburied mass grave in less than forty seconds.
