The iron collar of the central check shaft at Coldwork Bench was buried beneath two inches of frozen turf and dry sheep droppings. When Brenn drove the hardened chisel tip of his six-foot rock-bar under the rim and threw his two-hundred-pound weight onto the lever, the rusted iron gave a sharp, metal screech that startled a flock of snow-buntings from the western crags.
A square opening, five feet on a side, yawned in the center of the quarry floor.
Kezra Venn knelt by the rim, her gloved hand resting against the massive granite coping stones. From the depths of the shaft rose a column of air that was noticeably colder than the autumn wind on the surface. A still, dense chill that smelled of damp stone lime, stale iron water, and ancient dust.
“Quarter scale reaches one hundred and twenty-eight paces deep,” Kezra said, her voice quiet as she looked down into the blackness. “That’s four hundred feet of solid mountain beneath our boots. The law of the bonded book is total. A map maker can’t certify a volume from surface soundings alone. If you don’t physically go down to the base datum and verify the floor of the prism, the book considers the lower strata ungrounded.”
