The ramp leading down into Stonewake’s lowest courtyard was not an ordinary castle passage. It was an artificial canyon, twenty paces wide and plunging forty feet below the level of the main gatehouse, sliced straight through the dark, crystal-clear bedrock of the mountain ridge by ancient earth-working tools during the First Survey.
Kezra dropped the steep granite grade. Then, the familiar sounds of the upper citadel—the rhythmic clinking of the farrier’s anvil, the muffled barking of sled dogs. The shouting of wagon drivers in the service lane—faded into a distant, hollow murmur. The sheer, upright rock walls of dressed hard speckled granite rose on either side like the sides of an open quarry, fully cutting off the morning sunlight and plunging the trench into permanent, icy shadow.
Along the base of the rock walls ran deep drainage gutters carved directly into the living stone, weeping a steady trickle of black, stone-stained water that smelled of iron pyrites and wet lime. With every dozen paces of descent, the heat dropped noticeably, the air growing thick, damp, and heavy with the pungent, underground smell of wet iron ore, rotten-egg slow leak, and fresh coal-tar pitch used to lubricate the heavy hoisting machinery.
