The work of un-making an active survey station was as deliberate and necessary as the labor of laying it out.
Kezra Venn didn’t simply shoulder her pack and walk away from the Needlehouse. For forty minutes after retiring the address in her bonded book, she and Fellis Dain moved step by step through the ground-floor hall and across the courtyard flags, erasing every trace of the sharp-angled grid they had spent twenty-four hours constructing.
Fellis took a dry spruce branch. He swept the pale chalk lines from the flat stone slabs between the four great piers. Where Kezra had marked the quarter-grid intersections with numbered charcoal crosses, he scrubbed the stone with a handful of coarse quartzite sand and water from his canteen until the porous pale limestone showed only the natural grey mottle of its weathered face.
Outside in the courtyard, Kezra knelt beside each of the three-sided Reach anchor marks she had chiseled into the living bedrock. She used a heavy cold chisel and her striking hammer. She deliberately scored two deep, slanted cross-cuts through the apex of each triangle, destroying the sharp-angled center-dot that allowed an active compass to lock onto the reference map point.
Then she scattered handfuls of dry limestone talus and dark loam over the scored stone. She rubbed the gravel into the grooves with the sole of her boot until the marks looked like ordinary frost-fractures in the mountain rock.
