Kezra knelt on the cold clay floor of the drift. She set her lantern on a flat chunk of fallen limestone. She smoothed out Joric’s linen mine chart across her thighs. She held it down against the cold underground draft with the flat of her palm. Beside it, she opened her bonded survey notebook to page thirty-six, weighting the leather-bound leaf with her notched ash rule.
The contrast between the two documents was immediate, sharp, and jarring.
Joric’s chart, drafted thirty-three years before by an accredited royal land-mapper named Vane, was a masterpiece of classical civil drafting. In elegant, faded brown dark oak-ink, with clean, ruled border flourishes and gold-tinted height contours, it depicted the underground workings as an orderly grid of stone chambers, wide drainage drifts, and massive load-bearing pillars of dark stone. Across the bottom of the thick parchment, an official crimson wax seal of the Provincial Bureau of Public Works bore Vane’s cursive signed name, certifying under penalty of royal forfeiture that every drift had been sounded with steel rods and checked to support four hundred gross hundredweight of roadbed.
According to Vane’s parchment, the eastern pillar at the intersection of the main drainage drift and the northern tool drift was eight paces square, cut from solid fiery bedrock, capable of bearing five hundred thousand pounds of overburden without settling a hair.
