Kezra Venn remained kneeling in the damp ash trench, her brow furrowed as she looked down at the buried stone under-road drain cover.
The slab was three feet square, cut from rough quarry limestone and recessed into the trench floor beneath eighteen inches of settled ash and gravel. It was the access lid for the main underground drain that kept the west kiln’s firebox dry during autumn cloudbursts. The drain had been laid thirty years ago, consisting of a nonstop vaulted channel of mortared river cobbles that ran sixty paces eastward beneath the pottery yard before discharging into the open meadow brook. If the drain collapsed, winter meltwater would back up into the lower chimney pipes, turning the firebrick into cold mush and ruining any firing.
She tapped the slab again with her brass-tipped sounding rod:
Thock.
She closed her eyes, turning her head to catch the sound deep ring.
Her right ear heard the first high-hum impact—the sharp, metal click of brass striking stone. But the echo that followed, the low-hum sound echo that traveled through the hollow air cavity beneath the slab, was entirely absent from her senses.
Of the permanent hearing damage she had sustained in the Saltglass Reach on Day 44. Because of that, her left ear registered only a faint, hollow hiss. The deep bass frequencies between forty and one hundred cycles—the exact tonal range that revealed whether a stone cavity was empty, choked with mud, or structurally fractured—fell straight into the silent gap on…
