The late afternoon sun cast long, reddish shadows across the river-bed scrub as Kezra Venn and Fellis Dain laid out the sixteen-pace measuring cord around the abandoned toll booth.
On the surface, the building seemed an ideal tester for a Plot-scale survey. The stone booth was eight paces wide and eight paces long—well within the sixteen-pace boundary of a Plot square—and its four stone walls were intact, true to the weighted drop-line, and oriented within four degrees of earth-measuring north.
Fellis walked the southern boundary line with the measuring cord. He used his left hand to set iron marking pins into the dry road shoulder. Meanwhile, Kezra took her iron sounding rod. Then she knelt at the southwestern corner of the building.
“Hold the cord taut at sixteen paces, Fellis,” Kezra instructed. “Keep the line parallel to the road ruts. Paxa, watch the mule’s picket. If the animal steps across the boundary while I’m sounding, the book will throw a blocked path flag.”
Kezra knelt on the sun-baked road verge, checking her brass compass against the orientation of the building’s south wall.
“Fellis, sight through the sighting rule from the southwest corner,” she called out. “Give me the bearing to the eastern quoin.”
