After sheltering through the worst of the midday glare in the shade of Paxa’s wagon, Kezra Venn walked the nonstop connecting path from the broken road to the southern quarry bench.
The path was exactly two hundred paces long. An unbroken, personally walked line across the hard limestone apron of the quarry floor. At every twenty paces, Kezra tapped her ash sounding rod against the stone, ensuring that the earth-measuring link between the two Reach parcels remained fresh to the minute.
Under the unchanging laws of her discipline, two parcels couldn’t be exchanged unless an unbroken, walked physical route connected their anchor pegs within the past twenty-four hours. If a single pace of that connecting path was unchecked, the class treated the two sites as isolated points in separate domains, forbidding shifted weight.
At the southern end of the path lay the intact counterpart bench.
The bench was a massive, sixty-four-pace square of virgin limestone that had been partially cut by quarry engineers thirty years ago before the works were abandoned. Its upper surface was flat, level, and clean—a natural highway bed of dense, blue-grey dolomitic limestone, resting on six deep-water lengths of solid basement rock.
Beside the northwest corner stake of the bench, Fellis Dain, Yseld Arken, and two burly quarry wagon drivers stood with the second matched survey cable.
