The dry-laid limestone retaining wall on the western flank of Coldwork Bench was sixty paces long, four feet high, and three feet thick at the foundation. Built forty years ago by a cooperative of local quarrymen to keep winter gravel from washing over their haulage road, it stood as a monument to sturdy, unmortared upland stonework.
Unfortunately for Kezra Venn, it also stood directly across the western boundary of her two-hundred-and-fifty-six-pace Quarter square.
Twenty paces of the wall sat inside the parcel. Forty paces sat outside.
Under the fixed rules of the bonded class, a boundary plane couldn’t shear through a nonstop stonework wall during an exchange. If she tried to activate the circuit with the wall in place, the magical shifted weight would treat the wall as an attached load-bearing tie, aborting the transfer and triggering an immediate, total backfire across all scales in her book.
“We can’t smash it with sledges,” Oakhart said. He ran his calloused hand over the dressed cut stone copings as the crew gathered along the wall on the afternoon of Day eighty-eight. “These blocks were quarried from the upper blue beds. They’re four feet long, fourteen inches thick, and sound as a silver crown. When the mountain shoulder arrives and the new foot-route opens into Alderfast, the High Crag men will need these exact stones to build a retaining low roof wall along the gully mouth.”
