The Great Sluice Terrace smelled of stale copper runoff, wet slate. The cold, unwashed wool of five hundred desperate men.
It was a huge cave carved out of the lower limestone strata four hundred feet beneath the city’s market level. Overhead, huge water chute pipes of riveted iron groaned under the weight of surging quarry water. Their rusted joints wept orange salt water into the drainage trenches below.
Lanterns of crude sheet-iron and animal fat hung from timber wooden props posts. He cast harsh, flickering glare over the gathered assembly.
Five hundred miners stood packed together on the terrace tiers. They had come from every tenement cleft in the Lower Sinks. The drift-diggers from the Quartz Veins, the slurry-skimmers from the Acid Wash, the wedge-drivers from the Deep Fissures, and the rough-cut carvers who had spent their youths grinding glow-stone lenses until their vision clouded into milky waterfalls.
In their rough, scarred hands, they carried the implements of their daily survival. Six-foot iron-tipped pry-bars, heavy three-pound agate mallets, forged steel splitting wedges, and long quarry picks with double-pointed hardened tips.
They were silent as Ren Vale mounted the wooden water gate platform at the center of the terrace.
Ren moved with deliberate, measured steps. He leaned lightly upon Old Corren’s shoulder to avoid jarring his left collar bone. Beneath his heavy wool gambeson, the ram’s-horn splint held his fractured collarbone in a vice-like grip. Every thud of his boots on the wet timber sent a tiny, ringing jolt through his…
