The young quarry apprentice’s question hung in the cool air of the drafting shed, simple, seductive, and dangerous.
At the open doorway, two wagon drivers who had been leaning against the shade of a lime wagon paused in their conversation, their ears pricking up. Outside in the sunny yard, where four stone-cutters were dressing lintels with rhythmic blows of their mallets, the clinking of steel on pale limestone slowed as the men looked toward the threshold.
“The lad speaks horse sense,” one of the wagon drivers called out. They wiped his sweating forehead with a stained wool rag. “Why keep an unholy pit sitting a hundred paces above the highway? You’re a Reach Mapmaker, mistress. You moved sixty-four paces of solid rock from the mountain into our road. Why not take that yawning hole on the cutting terrace and swap it out into the Great Salt Waste? Ten leagues of empty bitter salt flat out there where nothing grows and nobody builds. Swap the deep gap into the salt crust, bring back sixty-four paces of flat desert sand. The quarry has its working bench back without a single warning post.”
A murmur of agreement ran through the apprentices and younger quarriers gathered by the tool racks. To men whose daily lives were defined by aching shoulders, dust-clotted lungs. The constant threat of stone falls, the idea of simply wishing a dangerous deep pit into oblivion was almost irresistible. If magic could move rock, why should it leave a scar behind?
