In the high, circular library at the crest of the central Star tower, the morning sun poured through three broad casement windows of clear salt-glass, lighting up a drafting room that smelled of pear-wood shavings, lampblack ink, and fine linen thick parchment.
This room, two hundred and twenty meters above the valley floor, had once been Chancellor Ves Morn’s private inner sanctum.
For twelve years, the windows had been shuttered behind three-inch steel blast-plates. Behind locked bronze grilles had sat the classified cartographic folios. Secret diagrams of underground emergence feeders, maps of active claimant channels, and confidential ledgers recording which town wards were due for milestone harvesting. It had been a stonework designed to observe without being seen. A panopticon that measured human bodies only to calculate their energy yield for the country sky shield.
Now, the blast-plates had been removed, their hinges unbolted and dragged down to the Salt kilns to be cast into balance weights for the town flour mills.
The room was the public drafting hall of the Free Wards Transit Power.
The circular stone walls were hung with dozens of newly surveyed topographical sheets, pinned to soft pine display boards with polished copper tacks. The lines were drawn in crisp, waterproof inks. Black for bedrock and contour elevations, cobalt blue for natural waterways and irrigation canals, and scarlet for the approved public roads.
