The frost that rimmed the courtyard flat stone slabs didn’t melt. Just then, the sun cleared the eastern jagged crests of the Spine. It merely turned from dull grey to the hard, blinding white of powdered quartz. Kezra Venn stood forty paces from the southwest corner of the Needlehouse map hall, her boots braced against the frozen turf. She held the ring-end of the sixty-four-pace braided hemp outer edge cord against her belt plate. Meanwhile, Fellis Dain sighted through the brass slit of his sighting rule.
Across the first twenty-five circuits recorded in her bonded survey notebook, Kezra had measured sheep paddocks, ruined lime kilns, single-room dry-stone huts, and roadside watering troughs. Those parcels had demanded care, honest pacing, and clean corner anchors. But structurally they were simple sharp-angled envelopes. A stone hut occupied a single plane of foundation flat stone slabs. A lime kiln was a hollow metal tube open to the sky.
The Needlehouse map hall was an entirely different order of stone-built reality. It was a complex attached building. The specific, unforgiving gate that stood between Reach Mapmaker and the Quarter rank printed on page eight of her bonded book.
To satisfy the complex-building requirement, the law of the class allowed no shortcuts, no approximations. No generalized boundary envelopes. Every attached load-bearing member, every floor vault, every load-bearing column. Every cantilevered stair landing inside the sixty-four-by-sixty-four-by-thirty-two-pace Reach volume had to be walked, measured with measuring tongs, plumbed with lead bobs. Then he reconciled against a sixteen-pace quarter-width…
