The woman broke through the front rank of the workers, throwing her arms around Jem Vance, burying her face in his dust-caked hair. The boy sobbed, his thin arms wrapping around his mother’s neck.
Beside them, an old, gray-bearded quarryman with one eye stepped forward. His heavy hands shook as he touched the carved letters of Dennis Cole’s slate tablet. “That’s Dennis’s hand,” the old man whispered, his voice cracking with grief. “I worked on the bench next to him for fifteen years. No man in the province cut a serif like Dennis Cole. He was alive... He was alive down there... And they left him to drown.”
The old quarryman turned toward the weigh-station platform. His one eye burned with cold, terrifying fury. He raised his sixteen-pound stone sledgehammer, resting the iron head against his palm.
Behind him, seventy quarrymen stepped forward all at once. Sledgehammers, iron crowbars, and splitters’ axes rose into the mountain air with a forest of cold iron.
“FIRE ON THEM!” Captain Skarn screamed at his mercenary guards, backing away toward the weigh-office door. “Shoot the rioters! That’s an order!”
The mercenary sergeant—a battle-scarred veteran with graying whiskers—looked at seventy furious mountain quarrymen who could crush a granite boulder into powder in three strokes. Then he looked at Tomas Reed, who stood with the golden glow of the nineteenth royal seal blazing upon his chest, bearing the unchallengeable power of an Imperial Conservator.
