Dusk settled over the bitter salt basin with the swiftness of a put out candle, draining the glare from the white salt flats and replacing the choking fire of afternoon with a dry, biting chill. The first bats fluttered from the limestone crevices overhead. Then, Joric Thane’s voice rang across the wagon circle. He carried the clear power of a man who moved mountains by moving men.
Within five minutes, twelve drivers and veteran quarrymen gathered at the base of the counterpart terrace. They carried iron pry-bars, heavy steel split-wedges, flat-nosed quarry sledges, and six two-man rubble baskets woven from tough willow with rawhide-wrapped handles. They didn’t grumble about extra labor after a long day of standing watch. They were wagon drivers who had seen their nine wagons trapped before a forty-pace deep gap for four days. The prospect of clearing rock with their own muscle was far sweeter than waiting for their water barrels to run dry.
“Listen close, every man of you,” Joric said, resting both hands on a six-foot crowbar. “Venn says the magic that moves this shelf won’t take an edge that’s higher than a man’s handspan. The cliff above dropped twenty paces of broken rubble over the east curb ten winters ago. We’re going to strip that rubble down to the clean dressed limestone forty years of dust forgot about. But you don’t pry blind, and you don’t hack away stone we need to keep. You dig down to the red ochre line Venn gives…
