The silence that followed the removal of the powder kegs was not peace. It was the heavy, suspended stillness of a loaded crossbow waiting on a hair-trigger.
Tomas Reed stood beneath the dark belly of Stone Beta, his boots planted in four inches of icy slurry. Above his head, the seventy-ton pale limestone keystone leaned diagonally across the ancient river arch of Mount Sunder, groaning with faint, tiny settling sounds whenever the cold mountain slow leak surged through the bedding joints. Behind that seventy-ton keystone lay four thousand two hundred tons of blasted rubble. And behind the rubble, held back like an ocean in a water tank, seventy-four feet of trapped karst water.
“If this arch drops while we’re working the pilot water chute,” Captain Sile Rook said, shining his shielded lantern across the ceiling joints, “we’ll not need a burial detail. The mountain will grind us finer than flour in a watermill.”
“The arch won’t drop,” Tomas answered, setting down his heavy iron timber-ruler. “Because we’re going to frame it with four hundred cubic feet of valley oak before we touch the central wedge.”
At the base of the chimney ladder, carter Joram and four volunteer quarrymen from Split-Stone had lowered the timber haul: four massive heart-oak baulks, each fourteen inches square and sixteen feet long. The wood was seasoned mountain oak, dense as pig-iron, felled four winters ago in the southern foothills and soaked in creosote to resist water-rot. Each baulk weighed over eight hundred pounds.
