High in the jagged granite gorges of Mount Sunder. There, the mountain wind blew cold and sharp through the pine scrub, the newly erected timber memorial hall overlooking the Gray Pit quarry was filled with a deep, respectful hush. The hall, built of heavy squared fir timbers and roofed with split slate by the local quarrymen, stood directly above the sealed entrance of the collapsed Deep Gallery Number Four. The tomb where, twenty-two years earlier, eighty veteran stonecutters had been trapped behind padlocked iron safety gates during an engineered flood.
Inside the hall, seated upon four long tiers of rough-hewn pine benches, were one hundred and eighty women and their grown children. The older women wore faded black woolen shawls pulled tight around their hunched shoulders, their hands callused, gnarled. Then they scarred from decades of taking in laundry, carrying gravel buckets, and scrubbing stone floors to keep their children alive after their husbands had been declared ‘unlisted runaway debtors’ by the Ducal Mining Trade ring.
On the raised stone dais at the head of the hall stood Tomas Reed, Mara Flint, and Sile Rook. Beside them, resting upon heavy oak frame stands, were four massive iron-bound chests containing forty-eight thousand pure gold sovereigns minted under the Great Seal of the Bench. And standing upright against the timber wall behind them was the five-hundred-pound slab of gray granite that Tomas and the miners had hauled up from the flooded depths of Gallery Four—the stone slab bearing the names of the…
