At three o’clock in the morning on the twenty-fourth day, Pella Rook, Inspector Korr Var, and Eren Tal stepped through the iron air-flow grating behind the cooperage into the ancient beetle karst channel.
The contrast with the boiling steam of the Sluice Crown vault was breathtaking. The passage was four feet high and three feet wide, carved through the solid, blue-gray limestone of the High Tor by mountain waters ten thousand years ago. The air was cool, clean, and eighteen degrees. It smelled of damp limestone, crushed sweetfern, and wet pine needles. Along the vaulted ceiling, thousands of tiny, eerie-glowing lantern beetles glowed with a soft, pale cyan soft glow. It cast a gentle, ghostly light across the wet stone floor.
‘Keep your heads down and watch the ceiling drops,’ Eren warned, his broad shoulders brushing the rock on both sides as he carried his tool roll and a heavy ash pinch bar. ‘The stone is sound. But there are stalactite snags every ten paces that will take an ear off if you try to walk upright.’
Pella held the Courtesy Bridge message slate in her left hand. There, Imran was tracking their progress through the shaking sensors embedded along the cliff face. ‘Imran, we’re forty paces from the intake grating,’ Pella spoke into the copper horn.
