Kezra Venn kept her boots planted firmly on the native fiery rock two paces west of the limestone curb. She refused to step back onto the cut highway until she had sounded every foot of the contact seam.
Beside her, Fellis Dain held the brass end-ring of the sixteen-pace linen measuring line. His face was pale beneath the windburn and dust, his knuckles white around the woven cord. Behind them, Paxa Sel had halted the pack mule near a projecting dark rock boulder, her fingers resting lightly on the halter rope to keep the animal from shifting its hooves toward the pale paving.
“Take the western margin, Fellis,” Kezra said. Her voice dropped into the quiet, rhythmic cadences of the survey yard. “Walk three paces wide of the kerb. Don’t let your shadow cross the stone until we know where the anchors are bedded.”
Together, they paced the length of the displaced road. The linen cord played out through Kezra’s fingers, the red woolen tags marking four-pace intervals fluttering in the dry mountain breeze.
The shape was pitiless in its care.
The cut limestone paving was exactly sixteen paces wide—the lawful width of a double-track country freight highway, designed to allow two laden wagons with four-horse teams to pass without their hub-caps touching. From the northern shear line where the paving met the jagged dark rock to the southern drop-off into the crescent hollow, the length measured exactly sixty-four paces.
