Dawn broke over Mount Sunder not with light, but with a dull, bruised thinning of the dark. The freezing rain had stopped, replaced by a biting northern gale that drove swirls of white granite dust across the cobblestones of the administration courtyard.
By the second bell of the morning, more than two hundred off-shift stonecutters and splitters had gathered outside the iron gates of the Administration House. Word of the midnight seizure in the records storehouse had spread through the debt barracks like fire through dry shavings. They stood in the freezing mud. Hollow-eyed men in ragged canvas coats. Their woolen mufflers pulled was tight over their mouths. Their calloused hands gripping was heavy sledgehammers, crowbars, and iron splitting wedges. They didn’t shout. They stood in an eerie, dark silence that was heavier than the roar of the pit derricks above.
On the high granite terrace before the double oak doors, Tomas Reed stood with Nessa Vale and Mara Flint. Tomas wore his porter pack frame lashed to his back, loaded with emergency safety lamps, two coils of four-strand manila rope, and Nessa’s Swedish cable clamps. In his hand he held a rolled sheet of royal parchment. He was sealed with three large discs of red beeswax.
