In the center of the Trapped Court stood a solitary, box-shaped stone building that right away commanded Kezra’s skilled eye.
It was an ancient Old Kingdom survey hut, built of finely dressed limestone blocks laid in regular courses upon a raised stone base. The building was ten paces long and eight paces wide, oriented with textbook care along the cardinal spirit vein. Its heavy timber roof had long since rotted away under a century of trapped mountain snowdrifts. That left four sturdy stonework walls standing eight feet high, open to the pale square of sky above.
Kezra walked through the doorless opening into the inside of the survey hut. The floor was paved with six-inch-thick limestone flags, laid in a diamond pattern that had resisted the subalpine frost. In the northeast corner stood the collapsed leftovers of a small stone hearth, where lone observers had burned juniper charcoal during subalpine winter vigils to keep their ink from freezing in the hornwells.
Rusted iron mounting brackets still projected from the stone walls at shoulder height, showing where brass star wheels, wall quadrants, and sky sighting alidades had once been bolted. A decayed cedar cabinet lay collapsed against the southern wall, its joinery rotted into soft brown peat. But the stone wall-brackets that had supported its weight remained sharp and true.
