The granite basin behind Grey Crag castle was a barren bowl of gray stone six miles across.
For three hundred years, the local hill clans had avoided the basin, calling it the Hollow of Broken Shadows.
Now, forty heavy steam-shovels and three hundred air-powered rock drills echoed off the sheer canyon walls.
The air smelled of blasted rock dust, boiled away lubricating grease, and sharp sulfur from blasting cordite.
Giles Croft stood on the rim of the central crater. He held his twenty-inch brass surveying transit on its leveled tripod.
Through the crosshairs, he watched Kenneth Drake’s railway tunnel diggers drill an outward pattern of four-inch blast holes.
Every hole was drilled exactly eighty feet down into the solid Archean granite.
Beside Giles, Toby Karr sat on a flat boulder with a wooden drawing board, checking outward offsets against the master print.
