The evening wind across the Saltglass basin carried the sharp, bitter salt tang of dried stone beds and the cool promise of night. Two hundred paces south of the wagon circle, past the dry drainage ditch where the quarry team had stacked their spare axle-trees and split cedar baulks, rose the great stone shelf that Joric Thane had promised.
It was a huge, box-shaped terrace of compact pale limestone, cut into the base of the southern bluffs forty years earlier during the brief, wild boom of the country stone company. When the old engineers drove their barrow inclines into the hillside, they hadn’t worked crookedly. To haul forty-ton blocks of salt-cured building stone down to the valley freight wagons without throwing their heavy cart teams into the ditches, they had dressed the entire bench along a uniform three-degree drainage slope and lined up its long western face strictly to true north.
Kezra stood at the northwest corner of the bench, her boots sinking half an inch into the white chalk-stone dust that blanketed the rock. Beside her, Fellis uncoiled the tuned sixteen-pace measuring line. It shook the stiff hemp until the brass link at the eighth pace clicked against the stone. Yseld carried the two-pace ash standard and a mason’s plumb-bob frame, her dark eyes scanning the high cliffs overhead for loose rock before she set her spear against the limestone face.
