On the twenty-first day after the boundary crossing, the high western rim of the Quarry Ward was swept by a clean, dry wind that smelled of melting snow and crushed granite.
Eighty meters below the cliff edge, the vast, stepped tiered arena of the quarry digging pit lay quiet in the noon sun. For twelve years, that pit had been an underground fire of ear-splitting air-powered drills, steam shovels, and the rhythmic, terrifying thump of the world-size heat-sink water pumps. Now, the lower terraces were dormant. The iron cranes were secured to their mooring pins, the water jackets had drained fully into the deep limestone fissures. The great salt-glass heat panels along the retaining walls had cooled to surrounding mountain heat, glistening like pale green ice against the dark stone.
Along the sheer edge of the rim. There, the cliff fell straight into the deep pit, a work crew of twenty veteran quarry masons had spent four days constructing a low, dry-stone memorial wall.
The wall was three feet high, four feet thick at the base. Then it extended for a hundred paces along the natural curve of the granite ridge. It was built of rough, unmortared blocks of native gray pink rock. It was heavy, split-faced stones that had been dragged up from the middle drift by teams of mules, fitted together with the ancient, unbending linked shape that quarrymen used for permanent retaining dikes. It had no carved royal crest, no decorative classical top stone ledge, and no…
