By the second hour of the morning watch, all four demolition kegs lay steadied on the floor of the Cauldron Vault, their weeping staves caked in dry oat-flour paste, their deadly copper detonators safely resting in Tomas’s padded tin box.
The immediate danger of a touch-sensitive explosion had passed. But the physical reality of cart hauling remained. One hundred pounds of high-grade royal siege powder had to be hauled one hundred and eighty feet straight up through the upright limestone chimney of Mount Sunder, past the ice-slicked dogleg at Tier Two, and out onto the storm-swept scree of the Upper Arch.
If a sling parted ninety feet up the shaft, or if a keg broke loose and smashed against the pale limestone spurs of the chimney, the moving shock of the fall would shatter the wood and ignite the powder upon impact.
Tomas stood beside the packing bench, unrolling a twenty-foot sling built from three-inch braided hemp webbing, lined with double-layered wool cart hauling blankets.
“We don’t haul them one by one,” Tomas said, his voice quiet in the vast cave. “If we make four separate trips up that chimney, we quadruple the fatigue on the snubbing line and double the chance of an iced rung giving way under our boots. We haul them two at a time, locked inside the padded webbing cradle.”
