The left pine guide runner split with a sickening, ragged crack that shuddered through the sole-leather of Tomas Reed’s boots. A four-foot sliver of seasoned pitch-pine tore free from the shaft stacked timber frame, tumbling away into the pitch-black deep pit below. The cage lurched another six feet downward in a violent, twisting drop, throwing the six young stonecutters against the iron mesh with wild shouts of terror.
Overseer Crag shrieked, clutching his knees in the grease-filmed corner, his face the color of wet lime plaster. Above them, fifty feet up the upright timber throat, the cut hoist cable hung limp against the sky, its frayed steel wires clicking like dead insects against the timber headframe.
Tomas didn’t shout. In the blinding clarity of moving disaster, his cart driver’s mind stripped the crisis down to mass, gaining speed, and friction. The right-hand safety dog was holding. But the single chisel-tooth was charring the wood to black cinder under three tons of dead weight. If the right runner snapped, the entire iron cage would roll into the central void. He plunged four hundred feet to smash against the sump floor.
“Sile! The pinch-bar!” Tomas commanded, his voice cutting through the panic like an iron wedge.
