The floor of the Cauldron Vault was cold as a butcher’s cellar. Ankle-deep in limestone gravel slurry, Tomas Reed stood forty paces back from the shattered throat of the Great Siphon. He looked up at the four-thousand-ton barrier that had stolen Split-Stone’s river for two decades.
Seen from below, the full shape of the Dragon-Slayers’ crime was laid bare. This was no heroic collapse wrought by the death-throes of a dragon. Across the forty-foot face of the limestone arch ran sixteen distinct bore-holes, each two inches in width. It was driven with military star-drills into the load-bearing thrust-joints of the mountain. The heroes had not fought a monster here. They had conducted a careful, contract-breaching demolition to divert forty thousand miner’s inches of water into the private gold-washing water chutes of Mount Sunder.
Stone Beta formed the keystone of the blockage. It was a massive stone seventy-ton block of dark pale limestone, five deep-water lengths wide and three deep-water lengths thick, wedged diagonally across the ancient watercourse. Behind it, packed tight by twenty winters of underground pressure, lay four thousand two hundred tons of blasted rock, clay, and river silt.
Beside the north wall. There, the rock face curved into a natural stone support prop, Tomas found the physical proof of that old trick. Half-buried in calcium crust sat a bronze benchmark nail driven into the limestone doorstep. It was stamped with the mark of the Royal Survey Office. An anchor flanked by the initials M.K. · SENIOR SAPPER.
