Kezra leaned her full weight backward, throwing sixty pounds of lean muscle onto the hemp lanyard.
Across the silent courtyard, the twenty-pace line snapped taut with a sharp twang. The bronze release lever in the western pilaster lifted two inches, its counterbalanced pawl disengaging from the ratchet teeth with a clear, ringing metal clink.
For one painful heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then, deep inside the hollow limestone stonework of the flanking piers, two thousand pounds of cast-iron balance weights dropped into the darkness.
A low, underground grinding rumble echoed through the bedrock beneath their boots. The heavy, corrugated iron fire-shutter groaned as its greased side-flanges engaged the bronze guide tracks. It slid smoothly upward into the hollow recess of the top door beam. With a long, muffled hiss of ancient graphite grease and rolling chains, the thousand-pound iron plate rose four feet above the flat stone slabs. It showed a broad, dark level opening into the mountain’s belly.
“Safety pitons!” Fellis called out from behind the survey hut wall, his voice ringing across the court. “Yseld, jam the tracks before the balance weights bounce!”
Yseld moved like a striking viper. Darting across the twenty paces of open courtyard with two heavy forged-steel climbing pitons and a wooden mallet in her hands, she slid the narrowed wedges into the bronze guide tracks beneath the bottom lip of the raised shutter. She drove them home with four rapid, ear-splitting blows: crack... Crack... Crack... Crack!
