Sinkstone

Rusa Marran is the strongest young bearer in three generations, trained to pour the weight of her own bones into a hammer and hold a cliff road against an army. Then the empire rolls a wheeled mortar onto the salt below her province and flattens eighty feet of rock with a single hand-sized core. Her uncle, keeper of the clan ossuary, has found plaster casts where four hundred ancestors should be. What Kirra has been quietly sending north for fifty years is about to be fired back at it.