The steam cloud venting from the crippled hoist engine filled the sub-floor of the engine house with a solid, scalding fog that condensed against the cold oak floor beams in heavy, scalding drops. Through this blinding white blanket, Sile Rook was the first to heave his massive shoulders up through the check hatch.
Sile held his two-inch heart-oak tall body-shield in his left arm. His right hand gripped Tomas’s five-foot iron pinch-bar. Behind him came Mara Flint, herding the six young stonecutters through the opening, followed right away by Tomas Reed, whose ash-wood pack frame bore the heavy seventy-five-pound canvas crates of Dennis Cole’s slate leaves.
The shift from underground darkness to surface daylight struck them like a physical blow. Even through the billowing steam, the cold alpine glare of Mount Sunder burned their dilated pupils with fierce intensity. The air was twenty degrees below freezing, smelling of snow, spruce resin, and coal smoke.
“There they’re!” a mercenary voice barked through the steam twenty paces ahead. “By the backup fan casing! The inspectors are alive!”
Captain Vane Skarn stood on the raised timber walkway of the headframe platform, his fur-lined leather brigandine buckled over blackened chainmail. In his hand was a drawn steel broadsword, pointing directly at the hatchway.
