The heat struck Edda in the chest thirty feet before she reached the bottom rung of the upkeep ladder.
It wasn’t the dry, radiant warmth of a domestic hearth, nor was it the choking bake of a summer hayloft. It was a dense, physical wall of boiling salt water and boiled away stone grease that tasted of bitter lime and burned the wet inner skin of her nostrils with her first shallow breath. The air had a weight to it, heavy as wet felt. It pressed against her wool shirt and soaked the leather of her tool apron until the straps bit into her collarbones like lead weights.
She had spent eight years working the limestone terraces on the western rim, quarrying ballast for the railway beds and rough cut stone for the town retaining walls. She knew stone under cold mountain rain. She knew the clean, powdery smell of crushed white spar-stone and the dull thud of an iron wedge splitting a four-ton block along its rock layer seam. But this pit had ceased to be a quarry twelve years ago when Morn’s engineers blasted out the central dark rock floor to create the country heat sink. They had turned a working quarry into a heavy-duty execution ground, lining the depths with cast-iron chimney pipes and drainage channels designed to swallow the excess energy harvested from the dark.
