The eastern drift of Station IV was a cold, dripping tunnel that smelled of crushed hard black rock and damp copper. For the first eighty paces, Kezra and Voss walked with their heads bowed beneath the square-cut timber sets that the ancient survey corps had wedged into the rock to support the fractured ceiling. The cedar posts, black with age and stone-hard by stone-rich slow leak, had held their ground for hundreds of years. Their grain was tightly packed into iron-hard flutes that rang like bell-metal whenever Voss’s pick tapped them in passing.
At pace ninety-six, the timber sets ended, and the drift ceiling plunged to four feet. Voss dropped onto his leather-padded knees without a word of complaint, his heavy frame shifting forward with the slow, economical crawl of an experienced stope-miner. Kezra followed directly behind him, keeping her lantern hook clamped between her teeth so both hands remained free to manage the measuring cord and sounding rod.
Every sixteen paces along the drift, a circular brass marker remained countersunk into the stone curb. The ancient survey stations cut by Nym Correl’s historical predecessors.
“Station Six,” Voss called back, his voice muffled by the low rock roof. He set his pick aside, reached into his belt pouch for his steel scraper. Then he began clearing the brass face of Station Six. A thick, crusty rind of milky white spar-stone had grown over the metal, deposited by hundreds of years of water trickling down the fault line. Voss chipped the…
