The second group of witnesses didn’t walk with the quiet deference of parish scroll-keepers. Twelve stonecutters from Mount Sunder marched into the well of the King’s Bench with the heavy, unbending tread of men who had spent their lives splitting granite five hundred feet beneath the earth. At their head walked Old Gerrick Vance, seventy winters of age, his face carved into deep wrinkles like a fractured quarry face, his hands as broad as roofing slates and scarred with blue gunpowder pits.
Behind him, four young miners carried two heavy wooden stretchers. Resting upon the stretchers were four flat slabs of gray granite, each three feet across and two inches thick, their rough-hewn surfaces covered in hundreds of fine, jagged marks chiseled with desperate care. They set the stretchers down upon the green baize table with a stone-on-stone clatter that echoed through the vaulted ceiling.
Tomas Reed adjusted his left wrist brace, feeling the cold weight of the granite slabs in the air. He remembered the darkness of the Gray Pit. Just then, he and Sile Rook had pried open the rusted iron air-flow grate. The dead, stale air smelling of wet limestone dust and cold stone oil, and the terrible realization that the collapse had not been caused by rockfall, but by padlocks placed on the outside of the exit gates.
