Inside the shelter baffle, thirty yards beneath the limestone overhang, the air was still and smelled of cold animal fat and dry soot.
Kezra Venn knelt on the packed earth floor of the drainage adit, her back braced against an oak bent. Meanwhile, Paxa Sel held the hooded horn lantern so its slit of amber light fell only across the rag-paper pages of the Bonded Survey Notebook.
Beside her, Fellis Dain knelt with his coiled four-pace measuring cord looped over his shoulder. His iron marlinspike was tucked through his belt. Yseld Arken stood at the doorway leading to the service stair. Her hooked climbing staff was held diagonally across the passage to guard against any sudden movement from the drying shed above.
Kezra turned to the fourteenth leaf of her ledger.
There, glowing with that familiar faint amber border, were the entries she had approved five days ago on the bluffs above the upland return road: PARCEL 15: Lower Limestone Terrace and PARCEL 16: Upper Camp Terrace. They had been surveyed as an emergency escape pair. Two four-pace Step prisms designed to carry the crew twenty yards down a cliff if pursuing Host scouts attacked their camp in the night.
