Kezra Venn backed out of the eighteen-inch crawlway. Then, her linen shirt was black with soot and stone dust, her forearms were bleeding from gravel grazes. Her jaw was set like an iron vice.
Paxa caught her shoulders. She hauled her the last three feet out onto the dry gallery floor, and right away checked her breathing. “You were in there seven minutes. Did you find it?”
“A five-pace flying foundation stone support prop,” Kezra said. She spat grey stone dust onto the flags. “Dressed limestone, keyed into bedrock through a shale slip. It projects fifteen feet east of the upper wall.”
She looked up at the square daylight opening twenty-nine paces above. “Fellis! Bring your transit sheet down the ladder!”
Three minutes later, the nineteen-year-old rigger dropped the iron rungs, moving carefully with his braced arm held tight against his chest. He dropped onto the floor flags beside Paxa’s lamp, laying his tally board and map point rules across a dry timber crate.
“Tell me the numbers, Kez,” Fellis said quietly, his pencil poised.
“Our surface square is centered on the upper building,” Kezra explained, her finger tracing the shape on the dusty wood. “Fifty-eight paces of wall, sixty-four paces of Reach scale. We have three paces of clearance on the west, and three paces on the east. But this buried stone support prop projects five paces east. The boundary slices through the outer two paces of the toe.”
