The southern frontier had no stone castle walls.
There were no towering granite castle walls, no moats filled with stale water. No spiked timber palisades stretching across the valleys.
There were only two parallel lines of heavy hard dark metal steel, resting on an eighteen-inch bed of crushed dark rock gravel.
The track stretched east and west as far as the eye could see, following the natural contour of the land in long, sweeping, exactly perfect curves.
This was the Iron Ring. Six hundred miles of nonstop double-track railway encircling the three million acres of Haven-Hold’s core agricultural and heavy-duty basin.
Giles Croft stood on the gravel ballast of Milepost Three Hundred, checking the rail cross-level with a brass track gauge.
The spirit bubble rested dead center between the indicator marks.
“Zero cant on the tangent,” Giles said. He rose and tapping the railhead with his wolfram-steel pointing trowel.
