On the upkeep terrace seventy feet above the quarry gorge, the wind from the outer peaks had risen to a howling gale that drove frozen sleet horizontally across the granite low roof wall. Len Vey stood motionless beside the transit station. His boots were locked against the foundation stones, his right hand shielding the brass objective lens of the sighting level from the ice.
His left arm, bound tightly in its split-ash laths inside his woolen coat, burned with a steady, throbbing fire where the cold had pierced the linen wraps. He ignored the pain. That kept his right eye glued to the circular eyepiece of the telescope. The brass tube was cold enough that the skin of his eyebrow had frozen to the metal rim, but he didn’t pull away. His entire universe had shrunk to the four-inch circle of lit up glass. There, the crosshairs divided the dark expanse of the quarry into precise quadrants of stone and steam.
The transit level was an old surveying instrument that his father had carried during the first mapping of the canal line twenty years ago. The brass housing was scarred and pitted from decades of exposure to sulfur damp. But the achromatic lenses were clear, ground by Melli Dorn’s father in the Salt Ward kilns. By adjusting the fine-pitch tangent screw with his thumb, Len could track a two-inch target across five hundred yards of blowing mist.
