For two quiet hours while subalpine sleet rattled against the iron shutter above the map room, Kezra Venn worked with ruler and pen to build a record that had nothing to do with parcel sign-off. Beside her on the low slate table, Paxa Sel kept the animal fat lamp trimmed to an even, smoke-free flame. Meanwhile, Fellis Dain rested his braced left forearm on a folded wool blanket. Then he turned the pages of the workers’ tally book with the careful, blackened fingertips of his right hand.
“The next name is Master Mason Torin Vess,” Fellis dictated, reading the blunt pencil strokes. “Born in South Gallow, forty-one years old at the siege. Mason of the fifth tier, specialist in dry-laid drainage arches. Remained beside his wife Maren in the lower entry hall. His final entry was written on the twenty-second day of the freeze. ‘Maren ceased breathing two hours before dawn. Laid her in the east nook wrapped in her wool coat. The well-pot holds two pints of melt. God keep the line-runners who carried the skins.’”
Kezra dipped her steel nib into the dark oak-ink and wrote the mason’s name in clear, unrushed block letters across the unruled linen sheet. She had ruled three clean columns with her brass flat ruler. Name and trade on the left, home village in the middle, and the date of final record on the right. She didn’t use the abbreviated land-mapper’s shorthand she used in her field notes, nor did she assign them…
