The sound that came from the locked still carrier was not human speech. It was the gut-deep, gritty friction of quartz pebbles rolling against shale in an underground torrent. It was raw, weary, and fully stripped of malice. Pella leaned closer, her grease pencil poised over her slate tablet, transcribing the sound intervals directly into phonemic notation.
The air beneath the granite block was freezing cold. It carried the clean, ancient smell of deep quarry seams untouched by sunlight for ten thousand years. A fine dusting of powdered quartz sifted down upon Pella’s hair and shoulders as the entity spoke. Every shaking traveled through her collarbones. That made her teeth ache with the body reality of the creature’s exhausting ordeal.
‘Deliver block to platform four,’ the stones ground out, each syllable formed by the scrape of dark rock against sandstone. ‘Ramp four was broken by the men with iron bars. I can’t drop the stone until platform four receives the weight. My limbs are turning to river sand. The command has no end. Deliver block to platform four.’
Pella looked up at the High Sluice construction terrace. Platform Four was an open, level shelf of dressed granite, perched twelve feet above the street level, equipped with four heavy iron derrick rings meant to receive building stone. The subcontractors had torn down the timber access ramp at dawn to move their cranes to the east wing, stranding the carrier in an impossible null-end-post loop. The contract demanded delivery to a physical…
