The final warning arrived at three o’clock in the morning. Meanwhile, the valley was wrapped in the cold, choking silence of predawn darkness.
Tomas Reed was sitting on an upturned nail keg in the Canton Vane forge shop, his ash walking staff resting between his knees. He watched the master blacksmith forge the rock-bolts for the timber wooden props. The forge was roaring with the breath of the great leather bellows. It cast a fierce, orange-red glow across the soot-stained rafters. It filled the air with the sharp, metal smell of hot coal, hammer-scale, and cooled salt water.
Tomas’s left forearm was strapped tight in its calfskin brace, the leather dark with oil and sweat. But his fingers were relaxed, resting lightly against the ash wood.
Suddenly, without a breath of wind or the sound of thunder, the anvil on the forge shop floor began to ring.
It wasn’t a blow from a hammer. It was a high-pitched, ringing shaking that traveled up through the earth into the heavy cast-steel base of the anvil, causing the loose iron tongs resting on the horn to chatter like teeth in a skull.
Then came the tremor.
The ground beneath Tomas’s boots heaved. Not with the slow, waving wave of a natural earthquake, but with a sharp, violent, upward punch that shook the entire timber frame of the forge shop. Overhead, the dry roof-straw roof rustled as clouds of soot rained down from the chimney pipes, and from the nearby village cottages came…
