While Pella remained at the academy pavilion to monitor the tracking data, Inspector Korr Var and Eren Tal led four town chainmen down the steep, muddy cart road into the High Tor quarry basin. The rain was drumming relentlessly against the limestone cliffs. That turned the red quarry clay into knee-deep glue that sucked at their heavy boots.
The reality on the ground was far worse than Eren had described. The ancient quarry floor was a dense, maze-like heavy-duty settlement of timber workshops, stone-cutting sheds, and open-air lime kilns. A hundred workers in burlap smocks were wildly shoveling river silt out of their kiln trenches, while women carried bundles of dry cooperage staves to the upper ledges.
At the northern end of the basin, where Sorell’s gold-trimmed blueprint showed a clean, granite-lined spillway twelve feet wide, Korr Var found only a stale, reeking ditch. The under-road drain mouth had been fully buried under four hundred tons of limestone spoil, broken bricks, and rotting melted rock waste heaps dumped by academy contractors during the construction of the High Terrace foundations five years ago.
‘Look at that intake,’ Eren Tal shouted over the roar of the downpour, thrusting his iron gauge rod six feet into the rubble heap. The rod struck solid, compacted lime-mortar that had set like stone under years of rainwater. ‘There isn’t twelve inches of open throat in the whole under-road drain! If Sorell opened his bypass gate right now, the water wouldn’t even enter the quarry. It would…
