The outer edge of Grey Crag had transformed from a jagged construction pit into a masterpiece of geometrical landscape building.
Standing upon the counterscarp lip of the northern dry moat, Giles Croft adjusted the brass fine-scale of his twenty-four-inch transit, sighting across the broad expanse of the new earthen glacis.
Beside him stood Captain Kenneth Drake and Chieftain Torvald Dune-Strider, their heavy cloaks snapping in the freezing mountain wind.
Behind them, the low, powerful angular profile of Bastion Alpha jutted into the landscape like the wedge-shaped prow of an armored warship.
Before them, stretching one hundred yards northward from the edge of the ditch toward the open plain, lay a gentle, unbroken incline of compacted earth, clay, and crushed gravel.
The slope rose at exactly four degrees, smooth and uniform as a manicured lawn, devoid of a single tree, boulder, ditch, or depression that could offer an inch of shelter to an approaching army.
“Observe the reverse-slope shape, Kenneth,” Giles said, tapping the brass barrel of the transit.
“To an untrained eye, this glacis looks like an open hillside.
