From the raised dispatch steps of the central tram depot, four feet above the level of the cobblestones, Ivara Quill looked out over the greatest human assembly the province of Rookvale had witnessed in half a century.
Six acres of stone paving—stretching from the brick repair shops on the northern siding to the high stonework retaining wall of the lower canal, and spilling out into nine side streets and across three railway embankments—were fully filled with living men, women, and children.
They stood packed shoulder to shoulder in the clear, brilliant midday sun. Their breath condensed into a vast, shimmering haze of white vapor that rose twenty feet into the cold mountain air before drifting eastward toward the alpine meadows.
Every trade, every ward, and every compromised layer of Rookvale’s twelve-year night was represented in that crowd:
There were eight hundred quarry drillers and sump laborers from the deep pits, their skin stained with the permanent charcoal-and-limestone patina of underground labor, their broad shoulders hunched from years of bracing against air-powered recoil. There were six hundred weavers and dye-washers from the River basements, their fingers raw and swollen from working the cold hemp looms in flooded cellars. There were four hundred kiln mechanics from the Salt Ward, their eyebrows singed away by fire flares. Their leather aprons smelled of sulfur and soda-ash. There were five hundred greenhouse tenders and fungal growers from the Orchard terraces, with dark loam beneath their broken fingernails.
