Dawn on Day ninety-one broke cold, windless, and bright as polished brass.
Kezra Venn stood on the limestone terrace six paces south of the plugged Alderfast haulage gallery. She watched the first lances of morning sunlight strike the massive pink-and-grey granite shoulder. In less than eight hours, that two-hundred-foot mountain of stone would be asked to trade places with an empty quarry three miles away.
Beside her, Oakhart was unstrapping his timberman’s tool roll, laying out a pair of brass rod-clamps, a leather mallet, and a bottle of neat’s-foot oil.
“We don’t touch the book until every rod is in its velvet case,” Paxa Sel said, her voice cutting through the morning stillness with cold and exact power. “The memory of Saltglass is our law today.”
Paxa Sel knelt beside the leather rod case, unscrewing the brass lid of her animal fat jar. “Let’s review the sound physics, Kezra. Not to frighten you, but to ensure that your hands don’t hurry.”
Kezra sat on a flat limestone block, watching Paxa grease the velvet lining of the case.
“When you strike a sounding rod during an ordinary survey,” Paxa explained, her voice steady and cold and exact, “the striking force travels down the six-sided shaft into the rock at a rate of five thousand meters per second. The stone absorbs ninety-nine percent of that energy through crushing dampening, returning only a faint sound rebound wave that your ear registers as pitch.”
