The four-pound iron sapper’s pick slipped from Senior Guard Keld’s right gauntlet and struck the wet clay floor of the tunnel with a dull, leaden thud.
Without the supernatural leverage of Sworn Duty propping up his spine and joints, the forty pounds of blued-steel breastplate, pauldrons, and mud-caked greaves settled onto the fifty-year-old sergeant’s frame all at once. Keld sagged back onto his armored heels with a ragged, shuddering exhale, his chest heaving against his leather brigandine as four hours of unsparing manual excavation hit his mortal muscles like a felled oak. Sweat—cold and sudden after the vanishing of the oath-heat—beaded across his grey eyebrows and ran down the creases of his scarred cheeks.
At the top of the notched pine ladder, young Tobin peered down through the trapdoor opening with his hand braced against the oak coaming, while beside Jon’s elbow, Alden Bram kept the curved iron hook of his ash measuring rod poised half an inch from the single three-inch pine wedge supporting the central gravel collar.
“Hold the wedge a moment longer, Bram,” Jon murmured, never taking his eyes off Keld’s gauntleted hands.
Keld did not reach for the dropped pick, nor did his fingers move toward the brass percussion cap of the three thermal fire-pots mortared against the granite cellar pier. Instead, the old sergeant looked down at the nicked white magnesium fuse-cord still lying across his left palm, then let the spool roll out of his fingers into the grey silt.
