Dusk had settled over the Great Frontier Trench like a wet wool blanket, turning the bitter salt clay into a featureless waste of blue shadows and freezing mist.
At the pithead of Bastion-Nine, the campfire burned low behind a windbreak of piled hazel hurdles. Olla sat by the iron kettle, stirring a thin porridge of oatmeal and dried salt beef. Meanwhile, Hester Quill wrapped her cold hands around a mug of hot mint tea. The wind off the plain had turned to sharp needles of sleet that hissed softly against the embers.
Twenty yards back in the ditch, a sharp clink of iron on flint broke the silence of the marsh.
Nessa Vale, who had been sitting with her brass sound horn rested against her knee, stood up instantly. Her hand went to the signal cord that ran along the ground into the drift where Tomas and the miners were clearing the inner breakthrough. She gave the rope three sharp, rhythmic tugs.
“Move away from the fire, Olla,” Nessa whispered, her voice tight and low. “Six men coming along the south sap. They’re not wearing army boots. They have rags wrapped around their soles to muffle the gravel.”
From the shadows of the collapsed wooden wall, eight men emerged into the firelight. They wore greasy oilskin coats with the collars turned up, their faces hidden behind blackened woolen scarves. Two carried heavy iron sledgehammers. Three held miners’ pickaxes. And the leader, a tall man with a scarred neck, held a…
