By mid-morning on Day 78, Paxa Sel and Fellis Dain had dropped the cleared upper section of the draught stair, their packs cached safely on the dry landing above the daylight slit. Paxa set her medical satchel and animal fat lamp on a flat stone bench inside the storage chamber. Meanwhile, Fellis sat by the doorjamb with his braced left forearm resting across his knees, holding Kezra’s knotted measuring cord in his uninjured right hand.
“Sixteen paces north-to-south, sixteen paces east-to-west,” Fellis called out, his voice echoing cleanly off the low pale limestone barrel vault. “The outer edge cord clears the stair door post by three feet on the west. The rear wall sits two paces inside the northern boundary. The entire stonework shell fits inside the Plot box with five paces of solid rock margin on every side.”
Kezra Venn knelt in the center of the flat stone slab floor, her bonded notebook open beside her knee. The rag pages were cool and silent, waiting for the physical proof that no map maker could fake.
“I need to inspect the rear footing,” Kezra said. She looked toward the dark eighteen-inch drainage trench that ran along the chamber’s northern wall. “The front flags rest on dressed cut stone bases. But the rear wall butts against an unmortared rock ledge. If that ledge is backfilled with loose fiery talus from the upper col, the parcel doesn’t have an eight-pace nonstop depth of sound stone.”
