The scramble up the spur took twenty minutes of hard, deliberate clawing through black scree.
Kezra worked her way upward behind Fellis, her new rawhide sole-guard biting solidly into the shifting shale. Barnaby had been left tethered below on the bench under Paxa’s watchful eye, his rawhide-shod hooves resting on the firm fiery tuff. Meanwhile, the physician boiled a fresh draught of bitter mountain tea.
When Kezra reached the crest of the spur, the wind caught her chest like a heavy wool blanket. The spur was barely ten paces wide. It fell away on its northern edge into a dizzying chimney chute that dropped four hundred feet into the shadow of the lower gorge.
In the center of this narrow spine stood the cairn.
It was four feet high, roughly cone-shaped. Then it built of dry-stacked field stones without a trace of mortar. The stones were flat, weathered slabs, laid with the careful, overlapping coursing of a master road builder. At the very apex, a flat capstone was chiseled with a shallow, weathered circle enclosing a four-pointed star—the traditional survey bench mark of the country road guild.
Kezra rested both hands on her iron-shod survey rod, catching her breath. “A guild cairn. Forty miles from the central registry, sitting on a ridge where wagons were never driven.”
“Look through your glass before you admire their stonework,” Yseld said. She leaned her shoulder against her staff. Her hood was pulled low against the scouring wind, her grey eyes squinting down the valley.
Kezra unslung her wooden instrument box and drew out her sighting compass. Davren’s compass, its heavy brass casing cold against her wool-mittened fingers. She flipped open the mirrored lid, unlocked the silver needle. Then she waited for the agate jewel to settle against the steel pivot.
“Take the gap first,” Yseld instructed. “The limestone notch where the freight road leaves the pasture.”
Kezra brought the sighting prism to her eye. Through the hairline wire, she centered the pale, sunlit V-notch of the lower pasture gap, twelve miles to the southwest. She read the compass bearing degree scale engraved on the brass bezel.
“Two hundred and fourteen degrees south-southwest,” Kezra called out.
Fellis held the slate notebook open, jotting the number with a piece of chalk. “Two-one-four.”
“Now the twin horns of the upper ridge,” Yseld said.
Kezra swung the prism eighty degrees to the north, aligning the crosshair with the black dark rock spires that crowned the Blackglass crest. “Zero-thirty-six degrees north-northeast.”
“And the benchmark height on your chart?”
Kezra pulled the waxed linen map from her leather metal tube, weighting its edges against the cairn with two small stones. She ran her calloused index finger along the fine brown ink lines until she found the tiny symbol of the stacked stones beside the southern saddle.
She froze.
Her eyes flicked from the chart to the compass, then back to the chart. She recalculated the intersection lines in her head, double-checking the three-point sighting angles against the baseline of the valley floor.
“This is impossible,” Kezra muttered.
“Read it aloud, Venn,” Yseld said, her voice flat. “Don’t swallow the numbers.”
“According to the approved guild survey,” Kezra said, her voice tight with skilled anger, “this cairn sits at the mouth of the southern wagon saddle, height four hundred and twenty arm-lengths above the valley datum, on a compass bearing of two hundred and eight degrees from the pasture gap.”
She tapped her compass against her palm, resetting the needle, and took the sighting again. The hairline centered on the exact same mark.
“It’s sitting on two hundred and fourteen degrees,” Kezra said. “It’s nearly two hundred paces north of its published map points, and more than forty paces higher in height than the guild seal certifies.”
A hot flush of irritation rose in her chest. The familiar, prickly anger she used to feel in the Kilnstep parish archives whenever she uncovered an old tax map drawn by an unfit land-mapper.
“Carelessness,” Kezra spat, pulling her brass pen from its sheath. “Sheer, shiftless town laziness. Some district land-mapper took his pay from the guild hall, climbed halfway up the limestone road on a foggy afternoon, got tired of the cold, and guessed his chain lengths from the tavern porch. I saw it three times in the Southfield drainage maps: an apprentice drops two links on the chain, doesn’t want to walk the mud again to re-measure, and writes down whatever number rounds out the furlong.”
She opened her working ledger, balancing it against the capstone. Then she dipped her pen into the ink horn. “I’ll log the mismatch under the land-mapper’s guild seal. When we reach Splitflint, I’ll submit a formal correction of error. A two-hundred-pace deviation on an official mountain chart is an insult to the craft.”
“Put your pen away, Kezra,” Yseld said quietly.
Kezra paused, the nib hovering a hairsbreadth above the rag paper. “Yseld, the numbers don’t lie. The cairn is two hundred paces out of place.”
“The numbers don’t lie, but your assumptions do,” the trail master replied, stepping closer. She pointed the iron-shod tip of her staff at the eastern face of the cairn. “You’re looking at your ink instead of the stone. Look at the lichen.”
Kezra blinked, lowering her pen. She crouched in the lee of the cairn, sheltering her eyes from the stinging spray of fine grit.
The eastern face of the cairn—the face pointed straight out into the teeth of the freezing gale that poured through the mountain gorge—was carpeted in a thick, velvety crust of pale sea-green crustose lichen. It grew in dense, overlapping rosettes, its tiny fruiting cups nestled tightly into the crevices between the stacked stones.
Kezra reached out with a bare fingertip, touching the lichen. It was soft, damp, and undisturbed, rooted firmly into the weathered rock face.
Then she walked around to the western side of the cairn. The side that faced into the mountain ridge, supposedly sheltered from the storm winds.
The western face was stripped raw. The stone was pitted, sand-scoured, and polished until the stone grains gleamed like dull lead. There was not a single speck of moss or lichen on any western surface. Even the stone edges had been rounded by decades of gritty scouring.
Kezra stood motionless, her finger suspended in the air. The breath went out of her chest in a slow, icy stream.
Lichen was the slowest clock in the high mountains. Crustose lichen of this variety grew less than half an inch in thirty summers. More importantly, it had fragile, delicate biology. It could only survive in damp, windless lee corners, sheltered from direct sun and protected from blowing ice grit. In the Spine mountains, it grew only on the southern or western faces of rocks that stood tucked against high cliff walls.
If this cairn had been built where it currently stood, the howling eastern gale would have flayed the green lichen from the rock in its first winter. Meanwhile, the sheltered western side would have bloomed with green growth.
Instead, the living lichen was on the windward face, choking on the freezing blast. Meanwhile, the dead, scoured rock stood in the lee.
“The growth is inverted,” Kezra whispered, her voice barely carrying over the wind. “Fully inverted.”
“It grew against a wall,” Yseld said, her voice heavy with grim certainty. “This cairn stood for forty years tucked in the shelter of a limestone cliff, facing west into a quiet gully where the mountain mist pooled at sunset. That’s why the lichen grew three inches thick on that face.”
Kezra looked around the barren, wind-blasted spur. There was no cliff here. There was no sheltering gully. There was only a narrow fiery tooth jutting into empty air, scourged by gales from every quarter.
“It wasn’t built here,” Kezra murmured, her mind racing through the earth-measuring implications. “The land-mapper didn’t miscount his chains. He built this cairn exactly where his chart said he built it—two hundred paces south, on the sheltered floor of the wagon saddle.”
“And then the mountain moved,” Fellis said. He stared at the green stones with wide, uneasy eyes. “How does a mountain walk two hundred paces uphill?”
“A mountain doesn’t walk,” Kezra said. Her voice trembled, not with fear, but with the shock of a land-mapper whose deepest shape has been uprooted. “A parcel of land can’t move forty paces in height without fracturing every rock layer seam within five miles. There would be an earthquake scarp. There would be shattered rubble, open fissures, torn roots...”
She looked down at the base of the cairn.
The stack of stones didn’t sit on bare dark rock bedrock. It was surrounded by a loose, shallow apron of dark fiery clinker, drift-blown by the recent wind.
Fellis stepped forward, his heavy, rawhide-shod boot dragging through the dark gravel. “Look here. At the bottom.”
He swung his boot like a broom. He cleared a three-foot arc of loose black scree from around the foundation stones of the cairn.
Kezra dropped to her knees, heedless of the sharp rocks biting through her wool gaiters. She brushed the leftover ash away with the side of her palm.
Beneath the loose black clinker, the foundation stone was not dark, vesicular dark rock.
It was pale, fine-grained grey limestone. Dense, bedded, and filled with the stone-hard stems of ancient crinoids. The clear, five-hundred-arm-length sedimentary limestone of the Kilnstep valley floor.