The narrow gap between the split cap-beam and the solid pale limestone wall felt smaller with every passing minute, as though the heavy silence of the mountain were slowly pressing inward.
Before speaking another word, Yseld knelt beside the entrance of the sky-slit. She laid out two heavy cast-iron screw-jacks and four seasoned oak wedge-blocks that she had retrieved from an abandoned tool locker in the main haulage drift. With calm, unrushed care, the tall warrior set the first jack upon a flat foundation block of dark rock. That turned the Acme-threaded steel screw by hand until the swivel head engaged the undersill of the fractured fir timber. She tapped an oak wedge beneath the baseplate with the heel of her hand, seating the iron firmly against the bedrock.
“One jack seated,” Yseld whispered to Kezra, her voice barely louder than the dry rustle of the draft. “If the roof settles two inches, this iron will catch fifty gross hundredweight before the timber snaps. But don’t pry the beam upward. We’re only holding what exists. We’re not lifting forty tons of fractured shale.”
Kezra stayed on her knees in the white chalk-stone dust, her lantern set on a stable ledge of limestone so the beam fell across Harn’s face. She didn’t reach for an iron prybar, and she didn’t let Yseld touch the splintered timber. Two weeks of riding with Paxa Sel through the badlands had taught Kezra more about human trauma than four years of guild manuals in Kilnstep…
