The sound traveled down the upright throat of the shaft like a muffled crack of alpine thunder. It wasn’t the whistling wind, nor the creak of settling pine stacked timber frame. It was the heavy, rhythmic clang of iron sledgehammers striking steel pins at the headframe collar, eighty feet directly above their heads.
Nessa Vale had her brass sound horn pressed flat against the rock wall of the Intermediate Drift. Her eyes snapped open, sharp and alarmed. “Tomas! They’re cutting the backup counterbalance line! Skarn knows the cage didn’t drop to the sump. They’re dropping the balance weights to purge the shaft!”
“INTO THE DRIFT!” Tomas bellowed, his voice echoing off the granite arch like a crack of artillery.
Sile Rook didn’t hesitate. Sile dropped his weight low. He swept two of the young splitters under each arm. He dragged them bodily through the stone portal of the pump room. Mara Flint drove the other four boys ahead of her with her bog-oak staff, shoving them around the corner into the deep rock recess behind the massive cast-iron pump metal tube.
Tomas seized the two padded canvas crates containing Dennis Cole’s slate tablets by their hemp rope handles. With a savage heave of his shoulders, ignoring the white-hot ache in his scarred left forearm, he hurled the seventy-pound crates across the threshold onto the dry gravel floor.
