The darkness that settled over the Ashen Basin was total, choking, and total.
Before the darkness fell, Giles Croft had spent two hours kneeling in the shale dust beside the transformer bunker. He tested the ground return path.
He had driven four copper-clad steel ground rods into the earth at precise twenty-foot intervals, connecting them to his portable megohmmeter.
Toby Karr had cranked the small hand generator on the wooden instrument case. He watched the brass needle waver across the graduated parchment dial.
“Ground resistivity is forty-two ohms per meter, Toby,” Giles had noted, jotting the number in his field book. “That is within our safety margin for a fifty-kilovolt neutral return.
If the soil were dry sand, the ground fault would back-feed into the power yard chassis and fry every transformer coil in the bank.”
Master Borin Bronze-Lung had wiped his heavy pipe wrench on his apron, squinting down at the copper rods. “Dwarven engineers never put fifty thousand volts into open dirt, Giles.
We keep lightning in iron-hard metal ley-bottles where it belongs. What happens if a stray cow wanders into the return slope?”
