Late that night. Meanwhile, the rain resumed its steady drumming against the slate roof of the way-shed, Kezra and Fellis sat by the lantern with the most heavily worn fragment from the supply boss’s basket.
It was a three-sided piece of heavy calfskin thick parchment, roughly eight inches on each side, torn jaggedly across the bottom as if it had been ripped from a bound archive folio during a tavern scuffle. The header was stamped with an ancient, faded insignia—two crossed land-mapper’s measuring chains surmounted by a level compass—and titled in formal country uncials:
STATION IV — THE NEEDLEHOUSE Sub-Spine Survey Corps Central Storehouse & Geodetic Bench Register
Across the center of the thick parchment ran a stone-built height plan of a northern parcel boundary.
Unlike the flat, featureless line of an ordinary farm boundary, this northern edge climbed from west to east in three distinct, flat-topped stone steps.
The first step was sixty-four paces wide, rising five paces above the western corner datum. The second step rose another eight paces, extending sixty-four paces across the center. The third step rose another eleven paces. It ended at a massive, dressed-stone base labeled Anchor Point North-Zero.
Kezra sat frozen on her keg, the lantern light reflecting in her widened eyes.
