At four hundred and twenty paces below the courtyard flags of Stonewake Citadel, the underground world felt stripped of all human pretense. The heat had steadied at a cold, dry forty degrees. The air draft that had rushed in through the two-hundred-and-ninety-pace gorge vent was reduced to a soft, whispering breeze that stirred the fringes of Kezra Venn’s sheepskin mantle.
Here, in the deep root of the mountain, the main upright shaft intersected the main slanted fault zone. The very fault whose upper gouge she had first sounded in the western miners’ quarters twelve hours earlier. The fault plane was exposed as a clean, polished wall of dark, glistening slickensides, where millions of tons of earth-shaking pressure had ground the opposing faces of basement rock into a smooth, waxy surface of dark chlorite and crushed graphite. Striations along the fault face ran at an oblique thirty-degree angle, recording the ancient ground-shaking thrusts that had lifted the entire mountain range out of the land-wide floor.
Tucked into a natural box-shaped recess on the eastern side of the fault wall, protected from ceiling drips by a solid overhanging brow of baked flint-rock, stood a five-foot cairn of carefully stacked stones.
Kezra froze on the gallery threshold. Her sounding rod lowered until its steel tip rested silently against the floor. Paxa Sel stepped up beside her, raising the brass safety lamp so its golden light washed over the stones.
