The cold iron of the heavy mining pick bit into the meat of Tessa Dene’s palm as she swung the four-pound cobbler’s hammer down with all the strength in her shoulder.
Clang!
A shower of orange sparks flared across the basalt floor, and the chisel point of the pick wedged half an inch deep into the bedrock fissure beside Jarn’s knee. Beside it, she drove a second heavy iron tamping rod into the same mortar line, wedging the two tools side by side like two miniature lightning rods planted in the dark.
From down the haulage drift, the scream of the lift cable over the iron sheaves grew louder, accompanied by the muffled thumping of heavy boots descending inside the iron cage.
“One minute, Tessa!” Sella Rusk called from the doorway, her boots braced against the haulage rails, her round shield screening the chamber. “The counterweights just passed the second gallery! They’re thirty seconds from the landing!”
“I hear them, Sella!” Tessa snapped through her teeth. “Keep your eyes on the track and let me work!”
Her fingers were moving with the swift, unthinking precision of a scrap-worker who had stripped lead off burning roofs and sorted copper wire from salvage heaps since she was ten years old. She seized the braided copper neck-cord of Jarn’s oath-silver token, pulled it tight, and whipped three turns of the wire around the thick iron shank of the pick. She did the same with young Tam’s token, lashing its cord to the tamping…
