Kezra unhitched her brass-bound land-mapper’s trowel from the side ring of her pack frame and drove the flat blade deep into the dark scree.
The black fiery glass clattered against the iron metal ring. It sent sharp chips flying across the grey stone. Fellis dropped beside her on his knees, using his bare leather gloves like scoops, shoveling the coarse black glass clinker downslope in wide, rhythmic strokes.
With every scoop of black gravel they removed, the impossible became more solid.
It wasn’t a stray boulder. It wasn’t a pocket of ice-slow float dragged south across the high passes during the great freeze.
Underneath the drift of black scree lay an ancient flight of three dressed stone stairs.
The treads were cut from fine-grained, pale grey crinoidal limestone, each step measuring exactly five feet in width, fourteen inches in depth, and seven inches in rise. The surfaces were dressed with the fine, parallel tooth-chisel fluting of a master stonemason, matching to the stone-built work on the communal storehouses in the old lower valley. More than that: the center of each tread was scooped hollow. Worn smooth by the scuff and tread of thousands of hobnailed work boots, ages before the first fiery cinder had drifted onto this ridge.
The steps led upward from empty air on the edge of the scree slope, climbed three measured risers, and ended flush against an upright wall of raw, conchoidally fractured black dark rock.
There was no foundation building. There was no retaining wall. There was no ruined doorway or collapsed terrace. There was only a solitary three-step stair of lowland limestone, resting in the midst of a fiery wasteland like a ship’s timber stranded on an inland desert.
Kezra sat back on her heels, her palms resting flat on the cold, hollowed tread of the middle step. Her heart hammered against her ribs with a slow, heavy ache.
Three stair treads emerging from bare hillside...
The words from Davren’s last letter rose unbidden in her mind, clear and sharp as the mountain wind.
Eighteen months ago, that letter had arrived in Kilnstep by the hand of a passing wool merchant, written on coarse grey rag paper with a frayed quill. Her mother Maud had cried over the parchment by the glow of the pottery kiln. She thought her son had succumbed to the thin air and fever of the high ranges. Kezra herself had examined the letter with a land-mapper’s cold, analytical eye, privately concluding that Davren was spinning poetic allegories to disguise his shame at failing to locate the lost northern basin of Alderfast. Places sometimes remained themselves while their neighbors changed, he had written. The road didn’t end, Kezra. The world around it was unbolted.
She had thought it the sad madness of an unmapped wanderer.
Now, she was kneeling on the exact limestone he had touched. Her bare fingers traced the smooth, hollowed dip where countless feet had trodden the second riser. She leaned forward, pressing her cheek against the cold stone, feeling the faint, lime-sand mortar that still bound the first tread to the second.
“He wasn’t mad,” Kezra whispered.
“What did you say?” Fellis asked, looking up from where he was brushing black dust from the lower tread with a handful of stiff broom scrub.
“Davren,” Kezra said, her voice catching in her throat. She swallowed the knot of grief and wonder, forcing her chin up. “In his letter from the second autumn. He told us he found three stone steps in the scree. He said they were real limestone, cut by men, leading nowhere on an empty ridge. I told my mother he was suffering from height sickness.”
Yseld stepped closer, planting the iron metal ring of her staff at the edge of the limestone block. Her face was set in granite lines, her eyes narrow and assessing as she examined the joint where the pale limestone met the dark stone.
“Your brother was an observant boy,” Yseld said quietly. “A bit reckless with his boots, perhaps. But he knew the difference between a dream and a dressed cut stone.”
“Then he was here,” Fellis said, a broad, triumphant grin breaking across his dust-streaked face. “He walked this spur! He stood right where we’re standing!”
The porter made a motion to throw his arms wide. He looked ready to shout his triumph into the empty gorge. But Kezra caught him by the sleeve of his heavy wool coat. He pulled him down.
“Stop,” Kezra commanded.
Her voice was sharp enough that Fellis froze, blinking at her in surprise. “Kezra? We found his trail. After a year and a half, we have proof he made it through the gap!”
“We have proof that three limestone steps exist on this spur,” Kezra said, her tone hardening into the cold, disciplined rhythm of her trade. “We don’t have proof that Davren is alive. We don’t have proof that he walked north from this spot. We don’t have proof that this ground was occupied yesterday, or five months ago, or forty years ago. Emotion makes sloppy land-mappers, Fellis. The moment we start celebrating our wishes, we stop reading the terrain.”
Fellis looked down at his gloved hands, then slowly nodded, his grin fading into a sober, determined nod. “Aye. Measure first.”
Kezra drew a long, slow breath through her nose, centering her mind on the physical world. She reached behind her back and unhitched her iron sounding rod. The four-foot shaft of seasoned ash tipped with a four-sided iron shoe.
“Clear the rest of the base,” she told Fellis. “I want the foundation course exposed to the rock layer seam.”
While Fellis cleared the leftover clinker from the corners, Kezra placed the iron shoe of her rod against the top limestone tread and struck the shaft with her wooden mallet.
Clang.
The sound was deep, rich, and ringing. It carried the solid, low-hum ring of sedimentary stone. A shaking that traveled four feet into the earth before encountering a dense, damp boundary.
Kezra closed her eyes, letting her Plot Mapmaker sense ride the sound wave into the rock.
The three limestone steps were not merely sitting on the surface like loose rubble. They were anchored into a box-shaped block of bedded limestone—four paces wide, two paces deep, and exactly two paces in upright height. It was a complete, discrete stone-built foundation, cut with clean, upright boundaries on all four sides.
And surrounding that box-shaped limestone block on every side was solid fiery dark rock.
It was an impossible earth-measuring condition under natural geology. Sedimentary limestone couldn’t be embedded within an upright chimney of columnar dark rock without metamorphic alteration. The molten magma that formed the dark rock would have baked the limestone into marble, calcining the fossils and obliterating the delicate tooth-chisel fluting on the stair treads.
Yet the limestone was fully unaltered. The fossil crinoid stems were sharp and clear. The lime-sand mortar was friable and soft. The chisel marks were as crisp as the day the stonemason laid down his mallet.
It was an exchanged parcel.
An ancient land-mapper—someone wielding a class far beyond the modest Step and Plot boundaries Kezra currently commanded—had excised a section of lowland road or town terrace, swapped it into this mountain spur. Then she left it stranded. Just then, the surrounding terrain was rearranged.
Kezra opened her eyes, feeling a deep chill that had nothing to do with the wind.
The legends whispered in the taverns of Kilnstep were not myths. The great mapmakers of the old empire didn’t merely draw maps. They manipulated the physical crust of the world, swapping parcels across leagues like merchants trading grain sacks on a market bench. And somewhere in these mountains, that ancient power had been set in motion again.
“It’s a foundation parcel,” Kezra said, her voice steady now, devoid of panic or false hope. “Four paces by two paces, seated on a level tuff bed beneath the scree. It has been here for at least forty years—the cairn was stacked directly on top of the limestone stonework after the swap was completed.”
“Which means whoever moved the cairn moved the stairs with it,” Yseld said.
“Yes,” Kezra agreed. “The cairn didn’t walk across the scree. The entire four-pace parcel was rotated and shifted into this spur.”
She took her brass notebook from her pocket and logged the dimensions, recording the strike, the dip, and the strata depth of the limestone block. She drew the box-shaped boundary lines with ruled care, noting the crinoid fossils and the sound deep ring of the foundation.
Only after her notebook was closed and the survey discipline satisfied did she allow herself to look at the lowest step.
The bottom tread sat six inches above the grey fiery tuff. It formed an upright limestone riser that had been protected from the wind by two feet of compacted ash and black glass scree.
Kezra knelt on the cold stone, leaning her face within inches of the pale surface. She took a soft horsehair brush from her kit and swept away the fine black dust clinging to the upright face.
Beneath the dust, cut cleanly deep into the pale, fossil-rich stone, was a fresh chisel cut.
It was three inches high. A clean, sharp triangle split down the center by an upright line, the stone around the clean cut gleaming bright and unweathered against the ancient limestone.