On the wind-scoured limestone rim of the Quarry Ward, Edda stood with her calloused thumb pressed against the cold brass barrel of the land-mapper’s transit.
The wind sweeping off the northern ridge was twenty degrees below freezing, sharp with frost and smelling of clean mountain spruce. It froze the tears that leaked from the corner of her right eye. That turned the coal dust on her cheek into a hard, black crust. Beside her, Geth Marr stood with his heavy leather rigger’s apron flapping like a sail in the gale, his massive hands resting on the oak levers of the derrick guide frame.
Four veteran quarrymen held the hemp guy lines, their boots braced in the crushed gravel, their shoulders hunched against the gale. For two hours, none of them had spoken more than ten words. They were quarry laborers who had spent thirty years moving heavy stone under the orders of city court foremen. They knew that when a heavy lift was staged on a cliff edge, an unmeasured syllable was an uncalculated risk.
The derrick was a heavy-duty extraction frame, timbered from ten-inch squared hemlock baulks that had been seasoned in salt water before the war began. It stood twenty-two feet high on the limestone lip of the pit, anchored to the bedrock by four forged iron eye-bolts drilled three feet into the solid stone. Suspended from the mast was a triple-pulley wheel bronze block through which ran sixty feet of one-inch braided steel cable, greased with heated…
