Ulvan Dret didn’t break the red wax seal with a dagger. Instead, he slipped a broad thumb beneath the calfskin lip, popping the wax wafer cleanly away from the leather without tearing the parchment within. With the unrushed care of a scroll-keeper handling rare thick parchment, he unrolled the top quarter of the sheet. He used the brass-bound edges of his leveling staff and a weighted lead line-weight bob to pin the curling edges flat against the smooth limestone flag.
Kezra didn’t cross the chalk line, but from six paces back her eyes took in the drafting style at once. It was carried out in dark, permanent dark oak-ink on heavy rag bond. It was drawn with double-ruled border margins and shaded with fine, slanted cross-hatching to indicate dark rock intrusions and pale limestone footings. At the upper right corner sat the formal company stamp of the Cairn Host Supply boss’s Corps, signed with Ulvan’s distinctive angular signed name and dated six months earlier: Day Twenty-Two of the Spring Thaw.
“This is the southern face of the blocked path,” Ulvan said. He pointed with the polished horn tip of his metal pen toward a section labeled South Mountain Shoulder (Quarter IV-B). “Two hundred and fifty-six paces along the east-west baseline, extending one hundred and twenty-eight paces down to the old drainage adit. It plugs the Alderfast haulage gallery fully. The iron cart tracks end forty paces inside the northern boundary at an upright shear plane cut eighty years ago during…
