A fortification was not a monument of stone. It was a physical machine designed to control the flow of striking force.
At Milepost Eight, twelve thousand feet beneath the frozen mountain surface, the silence of the deep tunnel was shattered by the rhythmic, ear-splitting clatter of sixty air-powered rock slotters.
Giles Croft stood on the center track bed with his brass leveling sighting scope, sighting through the swirling clouds of gray dark rock dust.
Around him, four hundred dwarven masons from Clan Karak-Thurn and two hundred human combat tunnel diggers worked in timed together, round-the-clock four-hour shifts.
High-pressure air-powered air lines snaked across the floor like tangled black serpents, powering diamond-toothed slotting bars that sliced deep upright channels into the solid dark rock walls.
High-pressure rock-splitting wedges followed right away behind the slotters.
With quiet, high-pressure groans, the wedges cracked fifteen-ton massive stone granite blocks from the cave walls. They were right away hoisted by overhead steam gantries to form the forward castle walls.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung directed the stone-laying crews with a heavy iron mallet, his copper-braided beard white with stone dust.
