The wind scour on the high limestone rim of the Quarry Ward carried the taste of crushed white spar-stone and frozen pine needles.
Edda stood braced against the timber guide frame of the main derrick. Her scarred left hand was tucked into the pocket of her oil-stained rigger’s apron, her sound right hand resting upon the polished hickory shaft of the four-pound lead mallet. Eighty feet below her boots, the square stonework mouth of the extraction chimney pipe dropped into pitch darkness, venting a faint, warm draft that smelled of sulfur, damp soot, and scorched stone animal fat.
Beside her, Geth Marr kept two hundred pounds of pre-tension on the wooden guide levers. His heavy canvas coat was dusted white with limestone flour from the upper crushers, his breath pluming in short, dense bursts in the sub-zero air. Around the derrick mast, four veteran quarrymen held the hemp stay-lines. Their shoulders were locked, their iron-shod boot heels dug two inches into the frozen gravel. For two hours, none of them had spoken. They were men and women who had spent their working lives measuring the load-bearing breaking points of rock and cable. They knew that in an upright lift staged over an unmeasured deep pit, a single loose syllable could mask the sound of a failing anchor bolt.
