A frontal assault on the pump house was impossible.
Three travelers armed with an ash sounding rod, a rope knife. A climbing staff couldn’t rush two seasoned cavalry scouts and a desperate thief through a narrow doorway without someone taking a steel blade through the ribs or an arrow through the throat. Worse still, the moment the shouting started, the corporal would scoop the notebook off the table and retreat into the defensible stone tower. That left Kezra outside with no way to force the door.
Kezra lay flat on her stomach in the dry northern water gate ditch, her borrowed quarry paper pressed against a flat pale limestone slab. Meanwhile, Fellis shaded the page with his coat.
“Look at the stonework lines,” Kezra whispered, her slate pencil tracing the external features of the building with quick, precise strokes. “Forget about the doors and the arrow slits. Look at what the building was built to do.”
A mining pump house was not an ordinary dwelling. It was a heavy-duty machine wrapped in stone. Built during the peak of the Saltglass stone boom forty years earlier, its sole function was to lift heavy, acid-burning salt water from deep underground water beds up to the high evaporation pans on the plateau.
