Kezra Venn walked slowly up to the pink-and-grey granite face, her boots crunching on the dry limestone ballast between the cut iron rails. She reached out and placed her bare hand flat against the rock.
The stone was ice-cold, coarse-grained. Then it dominated by large crystals of pink potassium pink rock and milky quartz. The signed name lithology of the high southern pluton that formed the central spine of the mountain range twelve miles away. It had no business being here in a lower valley dominated by stratified buff limestone and grey pale limestone.
“Look at the shear plane,” Kezra said. Her voice dropped into the quiet, respectful tone of a mapper witnessing an impossible shifted weight.
The upright cut ran from the stone floor straight up thirty feet to the arched ceiling, slicing through the limestone tunnel lining as cleanly as a hot wire passing through lard. Where the original builders had cut drainage chimney pipes into the tunnel floor, the half-round stone channels were snapped off at the exact same upright plane. On the other side of that hairline joint rose solid, unbroken solid mountain stone, fully plugging the gallery approach.
Fellis Dain dropped to his knees beside the cut rails, examining the iron with his pocket magnifying lens.
