Dawn on the northern salient of Grey Crag brought neither warmth nor relief.
The sub-zero mountain gale shrieked through the stone crenellations of Bastion Three. He carried with it needle-sharp granules of rime that stung the exposed skin of the guard post watchmen.
Standing at the salient apex, sixty feet above the frozen dry moat, Giles Croft adjusted the brass fine-scale of his twenty-four-inch land-mapper’s transit.
Beside him, Toby Karr held the leather-bound watching ledger, his fingers protected by double-layered wool mittens lined with rabbit fur.
Giles breathed onto the glass eyepiece to clear a thin crust of frost, squinting through the thirty-power optics across the smooth expanse of the new earthen glacis.
“The heat gauge reads twenty-two degrees below zero,” Giles noted, reading the liquid silver scale mounted inside the instrument’s dark wood case.
“Air pressure is thirty point one inches of liquid silver.
The dense, freezing air increases wind-cutting pushback by about twelve percent compared to summer baseline, but it also alters the material properties of the target.”
