Midnight at the Needlehouse brought a silence so deep that Kezra could hear the tiny, crystal-clear click of frost forming along the stone coping of the map hall.
Up at the southwestern top stone ledge, twenty feet above the courtyard flat stone slabs, Yseld Arken crouched on a narrow stone ledge-stone. Her climbing staff was slung across her back, and around her waist hung a canvas tool roll containing an iron lag-wrench, a small wooden mallet. An eight-inch carpenter’s frame-saw whose steel blade had been wrapped in three layers of animal fat-soaked wool to deaden the rasp of its teeth.
Below her on the frozen grass, Fellis Dain directed the work with whispered instructions and precise hand-signals. Even with his left forearm strapped rigid inside its ash-wood splint, the nineteen-year-old ropewright’s mind operated with the spatial mastery of a master rigger.
“The channel is twelve feet of squared cedar,” Fellis whispered, his mouth inches from Kezra’s right ear. “It weighs four hundred pounds wet. The upper collar is mortised directly into the stone gutter behind Yseld’s knee, pinned by four three-quarter-inch iron lag-pins that have been rusting in that pale limestone since Nym Correl’s siege. The lower end rests on an unpinned oak frame stand outside our sixty-four-pace Reach square.”
