The morning air on the upper quarry terrace had already lost its brief coolness by eight o’clock. That turned into a baking expanse of white glare that forced every man to squint against the salt dust.
Kezra worked at a wide drawing board she had propped across two empty water barrels near the counterpart bench. Beside her, Fellis held down the curling edges of two large paper sheets with flat limestone weights. Meanwhile, Yseld leaned against the cliff face. She watched the road approaches through a handheld monocular. The sun struck the white limestone walls of the quarry like hammer blows on polished tin, heating the rock until the stone felt warm through the soles of their boots.
On the left side of the board lay the painted Splitflint hostel map, its red stone-red roads, gold-trimmed scrollwork banners, and stylized mountain ridges looking increasingly absurd under the harsh, unsparing light of the desert sun. On the right side lay Kezra’s own working three-point sighting chart—a clean, white sheet of rag-paper grid upon which she had plotted the sixty-four-pace quarry benchmarks, the true north spirit vein. The exact compass bearing bearings she had recorded from the Sighting Rib during the pre-dawn watch.
