The air-powered descent from Mile Twenty down to the underground anchor vaults had taken barely six minutes.
In that upright drop of twenty-three miles, Giles had watched the heat gauge outside the hoist car rise from sixty degrees below zero to nearly two hundred and ten degrees above.
The shift from the razor-thin, silent empty pocket of space to the roaring, high-pressure depths of the world-size crust was violent enough to make a man’s sinus cavities ache with every breath.
Beside Giles in the cage, Master Duncan Stone-Splitter had spent the entire descent checking the teeth on his favorite granite scutch.
“Bedrock has a grain, Lord Giles,” Duncan had said. His thumb ran over the hardened steel edge. “Just like white oak or seasoned ash.
If you know how the stone laid down when the mountains were born, you can split a hundred-ton block with three taps of a four-pound hammer. But if you fight the grain, the rock fights back until it breaks your tools and buries your crew.”
“We aren’t splitting blocks today, Duncan,” Giles had replied, checking his pocket watch.
“We’re keeping thirty-eight million tons of steel tower from tipping into the sea.”
