Three days after the trial, a solemn cortege of forty free stonecutters dropped into the Deep Gallery of the Gray Pit. They carried eighty clean pine caskets, eighty bundles of bleached linen shrouds, and thirty torches of sweet resin pine.
With respectful, unrushed care, the remains of Dennis Cole and the seventy-nine master craftsmen were lifted from their resting places on the granite stone base. Beside each man was found his personal splitting hammer, his hand-chisels, and his carved tally rod. Not a single tool was missing. Not a single man had died in dishonor.
The caskets were brought to the surface upon ox-sledges, carried up the winding road to the high cemetery on the southern shoulder of Mount Sunder. A peaceful meadow of alpine grass that looked out over the green valleys and the great northern pass.
There, beneath eighty carved headstones of gray mountain granite, the Eighty Cutters were laid to rest with full civic honors. Judge Vane read the royal funeral service, while six hundred citizens stood with bowed heads in the mountain sunlight.
At the entrance to the quarry—now renamed the Free Granite Quarry of Mount Sunder—the stonecutters erected a massive monolith of pure white granite, fifteen feet high and four feet square, cut from the deepest vein of the mountain.
