The steel point of the land-mapper’s beam compass bit into the clean sheet of bleached drafting linen spread across the pantry table. It drew a circle eighteen inches in width with a sharp, scratching whisper.
Ivara Quill held the compass head steady with the thumb and forefinger of her single right hand, her wrist guiding the carbon-graphite lead around the outer rim without a tremor. Inside that outer ring, she scribed six nested arcs, each separated by exactly two inches of tuned linen, dividing the circular field of the province into seven distinct load-bearing zones.
“The stonework isn’t a castle,” Ivara said. She laid the compass down on the cedar planks and picking up a piece of hard, sharpened willow charcoal. “A castle is static. A castle can be breached with powder or starved by siege. Rookvale is a heat-powered closed cycle, engineered forty years ago to manage high-pressure high-pressure and heat flows. If you drop an anchor out of set, the backing-up pressure will liquidate the surrounding wards exactly as a water hammer ruptures a lead pipe.”
Len Vey stood beside her. His good right shoulder leaned against the brick door post of the pantry arch. His left arm was bound firmly in its clean sling. Geth Marr sat across the table, his massive, stone-dusted hands resting on either side of the linen, his single eye following the movement of Ivara’s charcoal stick with the intense, unblinking focus of a digging foreman studying a fault line.
