The northern sky groaned as eight huge granite boulders arched through the blizzard air.
Each boulder was a five-hundred-pound chunk of jagged mountain dark rock, hurled with terrifying titan torque from the giant lines three hundred yards out.
They tumbled through the freezing air with a deep, whistling hum, trailing plumes of dislodged snow like tiny meteors.
Master Duncan Stone-Splitter stood beside the corner salient of Bastion Two, his heavy woolen mittens resting upon the dressed granite coping.
He had built this wall with his own hands over three grueling autumn months, supervising forty quarrymen as they split, dressed. Then he set four thousand tons of mountain hard speckled granite.
“Look at the bond lines, Lord Giles,” Duncan said. He pointed down the thirty-foot face of the stone retaining wall.
“Every third course is a header block running six feet deep into the rammed-earth core, locking the facing stone to the soil.
We set the stones with high-pressure volcanic cement mortar mixed with fiery ash and animal hair.
