The afternoon shadows stretched long and thin across the carpentry shed porch. That turned the golden ash sawdust to dull amber under the cooling sky. A light mountain draught drifted down from the northern crags. It smelled of cold stone, dried lichen. The faint, bitter stone dust of the silver adits that had been worked since the valley’s settlement.
Adra Pike walked up the low cedar steps of the porch, with four men in heavy working coats of boiled wool and grease-stained canvas. The foremost of them was lean, wiry, and forty-five years old, with coal-blue powder burns and shale scars etched permanently across his knuckles and along the angle of his jaw. He carried a heavy forged sounding hammer tucked into his leather belt. Its steel head polished was bright from thousands of rock blows against the hanging walls of deep drifts.
“Kezra,” Adra said, stepping aside so the miner could face her directly. “This is Voss. He has spent twenty years driving timber drifts through the northern Spine, and for the last fourteen months he has been head drift-miner in Alderfast. Behind him are Tarek, Benn, and Colin—three terrace growers who know every stone drain, ditch, and retaining wall between the seed store and the lower kilns.”
