“Bring the chalk line and the short knotted cord,” Kezra said. She rose from the slate table and wrapping Nym Correl’s second journal inside a square of waxed linen. “Reading the blot is one thing. I want to see the joint at the bottom of the stair with our own eyes before we read another page.”
Paxa lifted the hooded animal fat lantern from the slab, checking the oil pool with a practiced tilt of her wrist. Meanwhile, Fellis slung his canvas note-bag over his right shoulder so the strap wouldn’t press against the larch splint on his left hand. Yseld Arken was already thirty paces below them in the outer service galleries. They probed the lower air-flow shafts for a way around the collapsed raised stone road. Her faint, measured chalk marks stood on the stone door post. The three of them stepped out of the map room onto the narrow spiral stair that wound down the inside of the displaced tower.
As they dropped, Kezra ran her right fingertips along the curved inner wall of the stairwell. The stonework was fine-grained buff limestone quarried from a lower valley bed, each block dressed with a six-toothed bush hammer and set in lime mortar mixed with crushed brick. A hundred winters in the high Spine. Then, not a single course had cracked or settled leaning crooked. A map maker exchanged an approved prism. Then, the entire 128-pace depth of bedrock and foundation moved as an undivided unit. The tower had…
