By four in the afternoon, the blinding white fury of the salt plain began to soften into a dull, brassy ochre. The purple shadow beneath the limestone shelf lengthened, stretching ten paces out across the bitter salt gravel toward the dry watercourse.
Fellis Dain stood up, stretched his broad shoulders until his spine popped like dry pine kindling. Then he reached for the handcart’s rear locker. He drew out the master fifty-pace linen measuring line, coiled tightly around its four-spoke ash reel.
The cord was three-ply twisted Egyptian flax, boiled in beeswax and crushed walnut husks to resist rot, knotted every two paces with braided red horsehair markers. It was the master survey line Kezra had used to map the Kilnstep limeworks and the Splitflint hostel yard. The standard against which all their paced distances were checked.
Fellis walked fifteen paces out onto the cooling gravel, found a clean joint in the limestone stone floor. Then he drove an iron benchmark peg into the rock with three firm blows of his stone-hammer. He hooked the brass ring of the measuring line over the iron head of the peg, backed away across the flat, and paid out the cord between his thumb and forefinger. That kept the tension smooth and even until he reached the fiftieth knot.
