As the chalk dust settled over Kezra’s diagram, three men stepped out from the circle of wagon drivers.
They weren’t wagon drivers or horse handlers. They were quarry masons. Veteran stone-cutters hired by Joric at the southern railhead to maintain the mountain under-road drains and dress retaining walls along the trade route. The eldest was Goran, a thick-set man of fifty with massive, calloused forearms covered in white limestone scars and eyes that had spent three decades reading the fracture lines of metamorphic rock.
Goran stopped at the edge of the sixteen-pace chalk square, laid a heavy iron measuring bar across the boundary line. Then it looked up at Kezra.
“You speak good shape, young woman,” Goran said, his voice deep and raspy from thirty years of stone dust. “My master in the southern royal works taught me the four-pace grid when I was an apprentice boy cutting bridge piers. But stone isn’t grease, and mountain rock doesn’t slide into place like butter on a knife. What happens to the outer edge seam?”
Kezra met his gaze squarely. “The seam is governed by the handspan rule, Master Mason. The relative outer edge elevations between the paired parcels must match within one handspan along all four boundaries after upright translation of base planes.”
