The air inside the western drainage adit was ten degrees warmer than the freezing mist on the ridge, smelling of wet limestone, rotting white-oak timber, and the sweet, chalky slow leak of underground water.
Fellis Dain guided the front yoke of the handcart down the final switchback of the overgrown gully, his bare feet feeling for loose shale in the dark. The wheel hubs, packed tight with animal fat and bound in strips of greasy wool, rolled over the damp clay floor of the portal with only a faint, wet sucking sound.
Kezra walked at the right shaft, her hand resting on the ash crossbar.
Behind her left shoulder, Yseld Arken held the rear tailboard, acting as a brake against the downward slope. Meanwhile, Paxa Sel carried her medical bag pressed against her chest so no brass buckle would scrape the timber props.
To Kezra’s left ear, stepping through the portal was like diving into deep water. The whistling draft from the mountain gorge vanished, replaced by a total, cottony stillness. On that side, she felt the underground air pressure against her cheek and the shaking of the cart wheels through her boot soles, but the heavy rumble of the drainage water rushing beneath the floorboards didn’t exist. Only when she turned her chin toward her right shoulder did the sound arrive: the crisp, high trickle of water splashing over limestone cobbles and the creak of Fellis’s leather harness.
