The iron rungs of the Empty Choir survey shaft ended at four hundred and ninety-six paces below the mountain’s frozen surface, giving way to a narrow flight of chisel-dressed granite treads that dropped into the sump floor. Kezra Venn swung her boots off the last bar. She felt the cold seep right away through the oiled oxhide soles of her boots. The air at the bottom of the mountain was not foul, but it was dense. He smelled of ancient hot-water sulfur, crushed damp pink rock. The strange metal sharpness of deep water that had never caught a beam of sunlight.
Beside her, Voss unhooked his heavy tin lantern from his harness ring. Then he held it high above his brow. The yellow flame guttered slightly against the steady, ice-slow updraft that rose through the central shaft column toward the bronze-flashed small roof-dome more than half a mile above their heads. The yellow circle of lantern light picked out the ceiling of the lower station. A vaulted six-sided chamber quarried out of massive grey banded rock, its walls bearing the distinctive herringbone tool marks of the historical survey corps.
On the north-facing pier of the chamber, three feet above the flagged floor, a cut cleanly bronze tablet remained bolted into a dressed granite stone base. Kezra stepped toward it, Davren’s horn-handled work knife in her right hand. She used the blunt spine of the blade to scrape away a thin film of damp white lime-bloom that had cried across the…
