Yseld Arken dropped forty paces of blackened, sulfur-stained hemp line onto the flat stone slabs with a wet thud that shook loose a cloud of grey bitter salt dust. She unbuckled her canvas field rucksack. She laid her hooked climbing staff across two cedar crates where the iron point wouldn’t chip the slate table. Then she dropped a palm-sized chunk of pale, newly fractured pale limestone beside Paxa’s animal fat lamp.
“The air at the bottom is clean,” Yseld said. She unbuttoned her wool throat-guard and pulling a deep, dry breath of the map room’s draft. “No choke-damp, no standing sulfur pockets, and no sign of military smoke. The animal fat stub burned yellow and tall all the way to the drainage sump.”
Kezra Venn picked up the pale limestone fragment. The rock was bone-dry, showing the clean, sparkling rhombic cleavage of living mountain stone that had never been snapped by a map maker’s boundary or cracked by frost. She turned her good right ear toward Yseld. That let her left side rest against the quiet dark of the inner wall.
“How deep does the descent go?” Kezra asked.
“Sixty paces upright from the crawlway mouth,” Yseld replied. She pulled an iron grease-pencil from her pocket and sketching a rapid height line directly onto the slate table. “The first twenty paces drop through sound, bush-hammered limestone risers—the old check stair Sela used during the siege. The steps are narrow, sixteen inches wide at the tread. But the risers are intact…
