The morning sun had climbed above the jagged crest of the eastern crags, flooding the broad road bench with clear, pale light that stripped every shadow from the limestone stone floor. with Joric Thane, Fellis Dain, and Master Quarrier Branden—a grey-haired mason with forearms like knotted oak roots and an iron foot-rule jutting from his vest pocket—Kezra Venn walked the full sixty-four paces of the newly installed highway.
Every few paces, Branden would pause, drop to one knee, and tap the limestone joints with the flat of a two-pound dressing hammer.
“Listen to that pitch,” Branden muttered, cocking his head as the steel rang against the stone. “It doesn’t buzz, and it doesn’t rattle. That’s three solid leagues of underlying pale limestone catching the shock and carrying it straight down into the mountain floor. When you dropped this block in, girl, you didn’t leave a half-inch void along the rock layer seam. It seated like an anvil on a seasoned oak stump.”
“The shape needs matching volume,” Kezra explained, adjusting the strap of her survey pouch. “Sixty-four paces wide, sixty-four paces long, thirty-two paces deep. Not thirty-one paces, and not sixty-five. If the underlying strata didn’t match the height profile of the counterpart within a handspan, the prism would have snapped along the outer edge and locked my core in an uncompleted cycle.”
