The inside of the abandoned toll booth was eight paces square. He smelled of dry sheep dung, ancient wood rot, and the sharp, stone tang of crushed dark rock.
The air inside the abandoned toll booth was noticeably cooler than the sunny yard outside. The roofless gables allowed the pale morning light to pour down into the room, lighting up decades of neglect. Rotted timber scraps, rusted iron strapping from fallen shutters. The dried skeletons of desert greasewood blown in by winter gales.
Yet despite the decay of the wooden ceiling, the foundational stonework remained spotless.
Kezra walked the inside outer edge. She tapped the lower limestone blocks with the brass handle knob of her sounding rod. Every block rang with a clear, solid note. The builders had bedded the lower courses on deep rock footings, cutting their mortar joints tight and filling the core with broken dark rock chips and lime grout.
“Notice the flooring timbers, Fellis,” she said. She pointed to the three heavy squared beams that spanned the room from east to west.
Fellis knelt on the threshold, inspecting the end of the nearest beam where it rested in a carved stone socket in the wall. “Larch heartwood,” the ropewright identified, scratching the seasoned wood with his thumbnail. “Slow-growth timber from the high northern forests, seasoned in salt water and soaked with pitch. You couldn’t drive a forged iron nail into that beam without drilling a pilot hole first. That wood will last three hundred years in…
