A hundred paces above the caravan highway, the upper quarry terrace was a tiered arena of raw, blasted stone, enclosed on three sides by thirty-pace upright cliffs of pale grey pale limestone. The wind swept across this high ledge with relentless, whistling force, carrying fine stone dust that coated eyelashes and dried the lips within minutes.
In the center of the terrace lay the counterpart parcel—sixty-four paces square, marked around its outer edge by heavy cedar warning posts driven two feet into the rock and strung with tarred hemp cable. Inside that fenced boundary sat the displaced deep gap. The shattered, yawning cave that had once blocked the caravan highway below. Under the bright desert sun, the inside of the sinkhole looked like the aftermath of an underground earthquake. Slabs of fractured limestone as large as hay wagons lay tumbled in chaotic heaps thirty-two paces down, their sharp, jagged edges catching the glare. Meanwhile, the cut mouth of the old collapsed drainage gallery opened like a dark, toothless jaw in the southern wall.
Kezra Venn walked the outer edge cable, with Master Quarrier Branden, his two senior pit bosses, Orin and Dannic, and Fellis Dain.
In her right hand, Kezra carried her iron-shod ash sounding rod. In her left, she held the board containing her original Day 35 depth sounding logs. Fellis walked three paces ahead. He carried his heat-tuned sixty-pace measuring line coiled over his left shoulder, while holding one of his standardized wooden signaling bars in his right…
