Diggings

The Diggings was an excavation site used to mine jell by slaves for the Shadow Lord, located in the Scour desert on alternative future Dorne where Riverside is, and where Fleet had once been before it. The Diggings lie next to the track that runs between Nanny's Pride farm and the Harbour. Since this timeline was prevented, the Diggings will never come to be.

Appearance and layout
The Diggings was surrounded by a high mesh fence and were made up of broad pits, their sides studded with tunnels which teemed with labouring slaves. Above ground were a cluster of sagging, flat-roofed huts which the slaves slept in, and towering above them was a high waste pile. The tunnels and huts were numbered so as to make it easier to keep track of the slaves. The shortest slaves hammered and dug in the tunnels while taller slaves hauled buckets of earth and broken rock out of the pits and tipped the soil into carts drawn by grunting beasts that looked like miniature, hornless bloodhogs. Other slaves brought hogs with filled carts to the waste pile. The Diggings never slept and was constantly filled with thick smoke and dust that reached high to meet the clouds and oozed through the wire mesh fence and onto the earth of the Scour. A pair of tall mesh gates flanked by large, white-painted marker stones are the only way into the Diggings, and were visible from the track running between Nanny's Pride farm and the Harbour. The entirety of the Diggings, including the tunnels, were magically lit by white, glaring light with no visible source.

The pits and dusty ground above were patrolled constantly by Grey Guards, some cracking whips and others bellowing commands, lashing out at any slave who fell or stopped work for an instant. Closer to the gate, offduty Grey Guards would rest in what was once the courtyard of Fleet, and later Riverside, sitting around a great bed of glowing coals set on a slab of blackened stone, which was once the gravestone of Ethena and Juste D'Or. When Rye, Sonia and Dirk entered the Diggings, the offduty guards had a huge chunk of meat turning on a spit above the fire.

The Diggings constantly had cave-ins, caused by the depleting of the jell in the ground.