The three notes of the brass miner’s horn didn’t carry the clean, martial rhythm of a royal cavalry call. They were the low, deep-throated, iron-throated bray used in the deep pits to warn of an impending gallery blast. The sound rolled down the limestone cliffs of Alderfast with the physical force of a rockslide, shaking through the flat stone slabs beneath Kezra’s knees and shattering the scouts’ coordination.
High on the northern ridge shoulder, silhouetted against the pale morning sky above the upper lime workings, stood twenty broad-shouldered quarrymen. At their head was Voss, his sixty-year-old face dark with stone dust. It carried a seven-foot iron-tipped jumper drill across his shoulder like a walking staff. Behind him, the miners fanned out across the scree in disciplined pairs. It swung heavy stone-slings and held sixteen-pound sledgehammers that could crack an iron helm like an eggshell.
“Down from the stile!” Voss’s roar thundered across the terraced hollow. “Troll the scree! Don’t let them reach the high road!”
A volley of fist-sized pale limestone ballast stones, whipped from thirty-inch braided hemp slings, shrieked through the morning air. One struck the lead scout’s calfskin shield with a hollow crack that shattered the ash frame. It spun the trooper around and dropped him into the briars. A second stone crushed the limestone coping two inches from the corporal’s boot, showering his shin guards with razor-sharp fragments.
