Kezra Venn knelt on the dark rock shelf two paces outside the southwestern corner of the displaced limestone road. Her shadow fell across the fresh incisions in the stone.
She didn’t touch the mark right away. She held her breath, leaning forward until her face was six inches from the rock, examining the cut with the careful scrutiny of an apprentice who had spent five winters learning to read stone signed names in the Kilnstep registry.
The mark was composed of three clean chisel strokes arranged in an inverted, split chevron, with a deep, circular center dot punched at the apex.
It wasn’t the crude scratching of a quarryman marking an extraction block, nor was it the hurried boundary notch of a boundary court guard. The three strokes were each exactly four inches long, cut with a tuned forty-five-degree edge that showed no chatter marks, no pause, and no backup fracture lines along the edges. The center dot was a true hemisphere, one-third of an inch in width. It was driven into the dense dark rock with a single, perfectly centered impact from a heavy steel punch.
“Look at the edge,” Fellis Dain whispered, kneeling on his good knee beside her. “That wasn’t done with a hand hammer and a cold chisel. The tool was hardened hard steel, struck with a weighted mallet. The edges are ground to an engineer’s limit.”
