Three miles beneath the roots of the Grey Crag Mountains, the dwarven deep-delvers lived among the hum of bedrock.
For five hundred years, the deep miners had ignored the surface world, trusting only the cold, unbending dark rock.
In the deepest watching gallery, suspended in a sphere of hollowed quartz, hung forty-eight twisting force seismographs.
Each instrument held a sixty-pound heavy dark metal swinging weight suspended by a quartz filament as fine as spider silk.
The pendulums didn’t move for earthquakes. Normal tremors were damped by magnetic coils.
They existed to record the deepest heartbeat of the world.
Master Borin Bronze-Lung stood in the gallery lantern light, watching the forty-eight diamond-tipped styluses.
For thirty years, Borin had known the styluses to draw straight, uninterrupted black lines on the rotating smoked-glass cylinders.
