There was no approved square thirty-two paces underground.
Kezra stood at the base of the air-flow chimney. She looked up through thirty-two paces of circular stone darkness toward the tiny square of pale blue sky above. She reached beneath her coat and touched the cool, stiff calfskin binding of her bonded survey notebook. Inside her mind, the class lattice was fully dark. Her Plot Mapmaker power reached eight paces into the earth. Here, thirty-two paces down, the magic was as distant, unreachable, and inert as the morning stars.
There was no corner anchor within reach. There was no exchange volume she could invoke. Not a single pebble in this underground tomb could be shifted by cartographic willpower.
The realization brought no despair, only a cold, crystal-clear focus. In the civil building manuals her mother had preserved in Kilnstep, an unlisted hole was simply raw earth waiting for honest tools. If Harn was going to see the sun again, he wouldn’t be saved by an awakened class or a royal ledger. He would be saved by three-inch oak planks, four-part rope tackles, cast-iron screw-jacks, and raw, aching human muscle working against gravity.
A weighted canvas ditty-bag came whistling down the stone chimney, guided by a thin green cord that hummed against the stonework. It dropped with a soft thud onto the gravel floor beside the barrow rails.
