For three grueling hours in the dim, stone twilight of late afternoon, Kezra Venn moved between the underground hardwood vault and the western air-flow drift, mapping a hole that would soon cease to exist.
She worked with her ruling board, her two-pace ash sounding rod, and two tuned flax measuring lines weighted with lead sinkers. Beside her, Yseld held the horn lantern, shielding the flame from the cold draught that poured down the upright fissures. Then she called out compass bearing bearings from the pocket compass. Behind them, Kroll and Brant cleared loose talus chips away from each successive measurement station along the base of the rubble apron, their iron crowbars ringing against the dark fiery dark rock.
Every four paces along the sixty-four-pace span, Kezra sounded the packed rubble cone. She tapped the steel metal ring of her rod against the snapped pale limestone face overhead, measured the slope of the fracture shoulders. Then she checked the depth of the loose shale apron that had spilled into the lower haulage way.
The task needed unrelenting physical concentration and a refusal to indulge in comfortable shortcuts.
In tavern ballads and royal court legends, an awakened geomancer was said to gesture with a bronze wand or stamp an iron heel, causing sheer cliffs to melt like warm animal fat or stone towers to rearrange themselves across valleys in the blink of an eye. But the arithmetic machinery of the Mapmaker class possessed no kinship with stage illusion. It operated under the…
