The morning wind off the salt flats carried the sharp, bitter-salt smell of crushed white chalk-stone. Kezra Venn walked up the gradual incline of the ancient quarry road.
Before her, the road ended in a sheer, terrifying deep pit.
Thirty years ago, an earthquake had dropped an entire section of the high limestone bench into the haulage drift below. That left a jagged, sixty-pace gap in the cliff face. For four hundred paces, the wagon road was broken. On the western side, where Joric’s fourteen freight wagons were corralled, the road ended at a fractured limestone lip. On the eastern side, thirty paces across empty air, the road resumed its course toward the high pass into Alderfast.
Standing three paces back from the edge, Fellis Dain knelt in the dust with the first tuned survey cable.
“Sixty-four paces along the southern road curb,” Fellis called out, sighting through his brass transit tube toward the western corner peg. “The cable aligns with our stone standard to the thickness of a coin. The brass quarter-rings sit dead on the sixteen-pace marks.”
Kezra stepped onto the surveyed outer edge. Her ash sounding rod was held in her right hand, her bonded notebook open to Page 013.
