Climbing out of the narrow drainage water chute at noon, Kezra Venn felt the warm mountain sun strike her shoulders like a heavy woolen blanket. Her hands and boots were wet with icy water drops from the twenty-foot descent. The knees of her canvas trousers were smeared with dark grey rock silt. But the deep, steady deep ring of the basement rock still tingled in the bones of her wrists and jaw like the fading hum of a struck church bell.
Voss reached down his calloused hand, gripping her forearm to hoist her over the lip of the opening. Beside the trench, two younger miners rolled the heavy flat stone slab back across the water chute mouth, seating it flush into its lime-mortar groove with a dull, satisfying thud.
Kezra wiped her hands on a dry rag from her pack. Then she took her hardened steel chisel and light iron mallet from her belt.
“The bedrock is checked to eight paces depth,” Kezra said, her voice clear in the noon air. “Now the anchors. Three cut-stone corner marks, chiseled into stable bedrock just outside the sixteen-pace outer edge. Under the binding mechanics of my class, they can’t be placed inside the square. They can’t be carved on loose stones or shifting gravel. A scratch made on a rolling boulder is inert. It must be cut into the living crust of the mountain.”
