The northern tool drift narrowed rapidly as Kezra and Yseld moved past the shattered entrance arch. The air in the side passage was thick, stale, and oppressive. He held a dead warmth that smelled of stale lime-water, sweating pale limestone, and the sharp, sour odor of human fear.
Along the curved walls, the tool-marks of ancient pick-axes were still visible beneath a yellow film of rotten-egg slow leak. Rusted iron hooks projected from the stonework, once holding spare trace chains, oil cans, and leather draft collars, but most had been torn from their lead anchors by the violent concussions of Tuesday’s cave-in. The floor was littered with fallen rock flakes that crunched loudly beneath their boots, warning them with every step that the rock above remained under dangerous, unbalanced earth-shaking shear.
Twelve paces in, the drift came to an abrupt, violent dead end against a backup cave-in.
A massive cap-beam of square-hewn mountain fir, twelve inches on a side and split along its central grain, hung suspended at an awkward forty-five-degree angle. Its upper end was wedged into a hairline crevice in the pale limestone roof. At the same time, its lower end was jammed into a jumble of flat white chalk-stone slabs and loose shale cobbles that had cascaded from the ceiling during Tuesday night’s tremor.
