By noon, the sun was a white hammer beating down on the edge of the collapsed road bench.
The deep gap where sixty-four paces of royal road had snapped away lay like an open throat cut into the mountain shoulder. On the southern lip, where Joric Thane’s lead wagon had halted four days ago, the wheel tracks in the limestone dust ended suddenly at a sheer, upright drop of fifty feet. On the northern lip, sixty-four paces across empty air, the continuation of the ancient road waited, its stone curb and drainage ditch mocking the stranded convoy.
Between the two intact lips was nothing but empty space, shimmering heat waves. The jagged, sloping cone of shattered limestone rubble wedged thirty-two paces below in the dark floor of the underground drift.
To certify a Reach exchange, Kezra had to map the exact three-space-folding void. Her notebook needed height profiles, strike angles, and depth measurements across the entire sixty-four-pace span. But a land-mapper couldn’t pace across empty air, and a brass leveling tripod couldn’t stand on a deep pit.
Fellis Dain and the caravan rigger Oren stood on the southern brink, examining the gap with the practical, skeptical eyes of sailors looking at a broken mast.
