The final pitch before the Diverter’s upper low roof wall was known to the quarry wagon drivers as the Devil’s Knuckle.
It was only eighty paces long, but the grade steepened to a brutal eighteen percent. A sheer wall of crushed dark rock rubble that rose between two upright cliffs of slick, black stone. Here, the canyon wind was funneled into a shrieking gale that blew directly into the faces of the haulers, carrying freezing spray from the spillway that coated every rock, cable, and handrail in a glaze of clear, dangerous ice.
No cart, wagon, or beast had ever climbed the Knuckle under load. In the old days of the empire, heavy machinery had been disassembled into four-ton parcels and hauled up by complex block-and-tackle rigs that took weeks to rig and cost the lives of dozens of debt-bound laborers.
Today, fifty tons of solid hard dark metal steel had to go up the Knuckle in a single piece, within twenty minutes, or not at all.
Tomas stood at the apex of the Knuckle, his cart driver’s boots planted on the massive dressed granite curbing of the upper terrace. Behind him, the level flat stone slabs of the Diverter crest stretched two miles toward the eastern horizon. Before him lay the eighty-pace chute of the Knuckle, dropping into the gray mist like the mouth of a quarry pit.
