Before the final decree was read in the square, Magistrate Vane signed an emergency interlocutory order: the immediate and permanent physical demolition of the penal gates of the Gray Pit.
Word spread across Sunder-Foot like wildfire on a dry heath. By noon, more than five hundred citizens had climbed the switchback road back to the mountain quarry. It gathered before the tough main gates of the Gray Pit.
The gate was a massive, twelve-foot-high barrier of spiked pitch-pine baulks, heavy with cross-bracing of two-inch iron straps and secured by a four-inch forged iron anchor chain held fast with a double-shackled Trade group padlock.
For fifty years, this gate had divided the free world from the bonded pit. Through this gate, children had walked at dawn to enter the dust clouds. Through this gate, broken men had been carried home on hand-barrows.
Tomas Reed, Sile Rook, and Mara Flint walked to the center of the road, stopping three paces before the iron barrier.
Sile Rook unstrapped his heavy sixteen-pound master quarry sledgehammer from his belt. Its hickory handle polished was dark by thirty years of sweat and stone oil. He turned to Tomas, offering the handle with both hands.
“You carried the proof up the chimney, Tomas,” Sile said, his voice deep and solemn. “Break the chain.”
