The wind that roared over the southern rim of the Gray Pit smelled of sulfur, bitter coal smoke, and crushed quartz. It was a cold, dry wind that sucked the moisture from the lips and coated the teeth with a fine, chalky grit within three breaths of stepping past the timber windbreak.
Tomas Reed stood at the edge of the deep pit, his cowhide boots braced against a massive coping stone of dressed granite. Beside him, Nessa Vale had already set the three pointed ash legs of her land-mapper’s transit into the frozen gravel, adjusting the brass leveling thumb-screws until the spirit-level bubble settled exactly between its etched black lines.
Below them lay the Gray Pit—a huge stepped crater half a mile in width. They plunged five hundred upright feet into the heart of Mount Sunder. The quarry had been carved out in nested circular benches, each tier twenty feet high and thirty feet wide, resembling an inverted tiered arena built for titans. Far down on the floor of the crater, men looked no larger than ants crawling over heaps of gray gravel, their iron splitters flashing like fireflies in the pale mountain daylight.
Behind them, leaning against a stack of split oak ties, stood Overseer Orso Crag. He was a broad, squat man with arms like cider kegs, wearing a tarred sheepskin coat and a grease-stained leather cap. A short, lead-weighted truncheon hung from his belt by a rawhide loop. He chewed nonstop on a plug of dried dock…
