The drainage under-road drain beneath the High Karst Citadel didn’t smell of sewage. It smelled of deep, underground limestone, frozen sulfur, and the cold iron tang of snowmelt running over dead moss. Fifty feet below the icy terrace. There, the cliff plummeted into the churning gorge, an arched discharge opening yawned like a black mouth in the limestone face. The under-road drain had been built eighty years ago during the first mining boom to drain groundwater from the lower foundation vaults, lined with five-foot rings of dressed granite blocks set in high-pressure lime.
Tomas Reed was the first to crawl through the narrow iron check wicket at the mouth of the under-road drain, his knees sinking into six inches of freezing, gravelly slush. His pack-frame had been left behind on the mules, replaced by a flat pigskin tool-roll buckled across his chest. In his right hand he carried an unlit lard torch wrapped in waxed flax. His left wrist brace was soaked with icy water, the wet leather tightening like a cold clamp around his forearm tendon scar. Behind him, Nessa Vale crawled with her transit horn held in her teeth by its leather cord, her elbows finding purchase on the slick granite rings.
