Stepping off the narrow stone flight of the air-flow stair at the one-hundred-and-forty-pace landing, Kezra Venn entered an underground world designed not for military defense, but for the patient, heavy craftsmanship of stonecutting. The arched portal opened into a vaulted underground hall whose proportions were right away striking. The room was sixteen paces long by sixteen paces wide, with an eight-pace ceiling formed by an ancient, self-supporting barrel vault of dressed limestone blocks.
For two hundred years, this workshop had served as the main underground staging depot for the royal survey corps during the first digging of the Stonewake mountain stone base. Along the northern wall, three massive granite workbenches stood intact, their surfaces scarred by thousands of chisel blows and acid-etching marks where ancient artisans had dressed boundary keystones and tuned earth-measuring leveling plates. On heavy iron brackets driven into the stone piers, racks of rusted iron tools remained exactly where they had been abandoned sixty years earlier. Heavy stone-dressing axes, toothed bushhammers, hand-picks, and iron wedges furred with dark orange rust.
Kezra paused at the entrance, her boots crunching on fine limestone gravel that had settled on the floor slabs. Beside her, Paxa Sel advanced two paces into the chamber, holding the air-testing lamp high above her head. The yellow flame burned tall, steady, and clear, fed by a steady, gentle cross-draught that entered through an upper air-flow channel and flowed toward the floor.
