The blow landed with the sickening, explosive crack of a lightning strike on frozen timber.
CRACK.
The polished center of the white limestone cube shattered into a spiderweb of streaming fractures, white spar-stone dust erupting from the benchmark in a fine, stinging cloud that coated Maud Venn’s boots, arms, and wool apron with fine white flour. The deep, nonstop hum that had inhabited the stone for forty days—a shaking so faint that only a land-mapper or a mother could feel it—died instantly, replaced by the dead, flat clatter of broken rock shifting in cold mud.
Maud didn’t pause to inspect the damage or mourn the ruin of five years of careful stonework. She raised the heavy steel head again, her face rigid with fierce, rhythmic concentration, her jaw set like an iron vise. Then she brought it down on the northern corner of the block with the full, unbending weight of her shoulders.
THWACK.
A fifty-pound three-sided segment snapped cleanly along its natural rock layer seam, tumbling into the drainage mud with a dull, wet splash.
THWACK.
She struck the southern face, shattering the hand-dressed bead line that Kezra had cut with her flat chisel five springs ago, reducing the delicate, leveled margin into jagged chunks of gravel.
