Behind the Great Hall of Waystation Seven lay the inner light-well—an open courtyard forty paces square, surrounded by the towering, windowless granite walls of the barracks and the stables.
In summer, this courtyard had provided light and air to the underground complex through an opening in the mountain rock. Now, looking up, Tomas saw that the opening was fully sealed by a massive dome of blue avalanche firn, forty feet thick, that arched over the courtyard like the stained-glass ceiling of a cathedral.
A strange, ghostly blue light filtered through the dense ice, lighting up the snow-dusted flat stone slabs in a cold, ghostly twilight that made every edge, every shadow, and every stone stand out with surreal clarity.
In the center of the courtyard, arranged in three neat, military ranks, stood twenty-two burial cairns.
Each cairn was six feet long, three feet wide, and three feet high, built of rough-cut blocks of gray granite hauled from the fallen walls of the upper low roof wall. The stones were fitted together with extraordinary, desperate care, their chinks packed with dry moss and river gravel to prevent the mountain wolves from disturbing the dead within.
At the head of each cairn stood a marker made of a split-pine barrel stave. It was driven into the frozen gravel between the flat stone slabs.
