For two hours, the troopers of the Third Regiment searched the workshops, drying sheds, and storage cellars of Kilnstep, their boots kicking up clouds of red brick dust and dry cedar shavings as they pried open tool bins and ransacked empty lofts. They found nothing that could satisfy a military inquest. The copper travel tags were gone, the merchant accounts were buried under five tons of coal behind the forge shop. The village lane remained as quiet and lonely as an abandoned burial mound.
Corporal Brand stood in the middle of the lower cart yard, his buff coat streaked with soot and his brow furrowed with thwarted purpose. He had ridden thirty leagues across the low passes on the explicit orders of Quarter Cartographer Ulvan Dret to secure an active earth-measuring terminus. An intact anchor in Kilnstep would have given the Cairn Host an unbeatable staging point—a lever to force the young map maker to exchange supplies, munitions, or escort companies directly from the lowland highways into the high basins. Instead, he had found a foul drainage trench filled with wet lime plaster slurry, a shuttered artisan village whose inhabitants had vanished like smoke. A stubborn potter woman who answered his warrants with silent, contemptuous patience.
