Kezra climbed with her boots placed carefully on the rusted iron rungs, her knees brushing the damp limestone wall of the air-flow riser.
Below her, Yseld’s horn lantern threw long, flickering shadows up the square rock chimney pipe. The chimney was four feet across, cut through the limestone strata twenty years ago by quarry engineers, its walls glistening with moisture and white streaks of selenite white chalk-stone.
At twelve paces above the gallery floor—thirty-six feet below the surface road—Yseld reached up and tapped Kezra’s boot heel.
“Hold,” Yseld whispered. “Look at your right shoulder.”
Kezra braced her boots on the iron rung, leaned her back against the western stonework. Then she unhooked her small oil lantern from her belt.
In the yellow pool of light, the eastern wall of the riser revealed its flaw.
A heavy, wedge-shaped block of white chalk-stone and platy limestone, two feet long and fourteen inches thick, had shifted forward from the rock face. It hung suspended in the wall seam. It projected four inches into the chimney. It crossed directly through the invisible weighted drop-line that defined the sixty-four-pace boundary plane.
“Look at the fracture planes,” Kezra whispered, examining the freshly crushed rock meal along the top seam. “This didn’t break during the earthquake. This moved two days ago, when Barst’s crew used five-foot crowbars to pry up the surface curbing stones along the road break.”
