Edda stood on the corner turret of the Star tower low roof wall, her wool scarf whipping against her cheeks in the freezing mountain wind. Her left hand, with its two crushed fingers bound in blood-spotted cedar splints, was tucked firmly inside the breast of her sheepskin coat to keep the cold from setting the bone ache into her marrow. But she refused to step down into the shelter of the stairs.
She had worked forty years in the deep limestone trenches of the Quarry Ward. She had seen the stone mountain split by black powder, seen steam cranes buckle under overloaded skip-buckets, and seen three ages of young apprentices lose limbs to rock-falls. But she had never seen anything like the silence that followed the death of the sky shield.
For twelve years, every living creature in Rookvale had lived inside an engine. The hum of the anchor lines had shook through the limestone floorboards, through the iron bedframes, through the water pipes in the communal sinks, and through the marrow of their teeth. It was a low, greasy sixty-cycle thrum that told you Chancellor Morn’s machinery was harvesting another milestone from someone’s son in the claim rooms. Now, that thrum was dead. The silence was so sudden and huge that it felt like a physical weight pressing against the ears.
