The cedar door swung open another foot. It showed a scene that made Sergeant Kroll draw his breath in through his teeth with a sharp hiss. Beyond the timber inner wall lay no damp military drain or empty crawlway, but a cavernous, dry-stone settlement carved directly into the western limestone bench decades before the Cairn Host had marched into the pass.
A warren of low, vaulted rooms stretched sixty paces westward along the natural bedding planes of the rock. Thick chimney pipes, fashioned from clay drain tiles mortared into the rock roof, drew smoke away from three open hearths where cast-iron pots simmered over glowing charcoal. Racks of drying mountain herbs, strings of wild onions, and woven willow baskets hung from the timber roof beams. Along the walls, wooden sleeping bunks padded with dry bracken ferns were stacked two tiers high, and in the central clearing between four massive stone pillars, four small children sat around a low frame stand table carving wooden spoons beside a pen of four tethered, placid nanny goats.
Twelve families lived in these underground chambers—thirty-four human beings in all.
An elderly tool-sharpener sat beside a hand-cranked sandstone wheel, his goggles pushed up onto his soot-streaked brow, while two women in grey wool aprons paused with their hands buried in laundry tubs of hot, steaming water. As the three Cairn Host soldiers stepped past Kezra into the light, every conversation died. A dozen men and women rose slowly from their benches. Their hands instinctively reached for…
