Dawn on Day 130 broke over Empty Choir in a wash of pale, diamond-clear light. The biting wind of the last three days had dropped to a brisk, steady breeze that drew smoothly through the whistling cabins, producing a single, sustained chord of clean piping notes that echoed across the vast terrace. The hoarfrost along the terrace edges sparkled like crushed glass beneath the rising sun, outlining each ancient granite flat stone slab in crisp silver relief.
All six people on the mountain stood gathered beside the circular stone small roof-dome at the center of the plateau: Kezra, Voss, Paxa, Yseld, and the two Brackenford stone-cutters, Bram and Orel. The heavy bronze-sheathed doors of the small roof-dome stood pinned wide open with granite wedges. It showed the yawning, dark mouth of the upright shaft and the heavy iron hoisting overhead frame overhead. The air issuing from the shaft was remarkably mild. A warm, dry breath from the deep crust of the mountain that plumed faintly in the freezing morning air.
Kezra laid her canvas equipment roll across a flat locust-wood staging bench inside the small roof-dome. Her movements were calm, deliberate, and unrushed. Around her waist she buckled a heavy harness of oiled steer-hide, heavy with doubled copper rivets and two forged iron screw-gate carabiners. Into her leather tool-belt she slotted her main sounding gear. The three-piece threaded brass rod, two spare hardened-bronze chisel tips, a small rawhide mallet for sound fine-tuning, her brass clinometer. A tightly stoppered horn phial…
