The lower hall of the High Senate Building was cold and cavernous, paved with flat stone slabs of gray fossil limestone that had been worn hollow by two hundred years of petitioners’ boots. In the center of the floor. There, the town land-mappers usually unrolled property tithe maps, sat the physical test model. The room smelled of wet cedar shavings, damp river mud, and the bitter vinegar used by archival clerks to preserve ancient ink rolls.
The model was eighteen feet long and nine feet wide, built of tongue-and-groove pine planks lined with soldered sheet zinc to keep the water from leaking into the senators’ records storage below. The model replicated the exact geography of Lathmere’s river confluence at a 1:50 scale. The steep granite gorge of the High Tor, the broad river-bed flats of the Gray Rush, and the shallow, silt-choked mouth of the Silt Reach.
Senior Municipal Engineer Korr Var stood at the head of the basin, his glasses pushed up onto his graying temples, a wooden dipstick tuned in tenths of an inch held between his ink-stained fingers. Beside him, Eren Tal was adjusting the turnbuckles on the timber bracing beneath the table. It tested the level with a brass line-weight bob hung from an ash tripod. The line weight swung gently, its steel point hovering half a tiny fraction of an inch above a brass center punch mark on the floor.
