At midday on Day Ninety-Three, the sorting shed became a workshop of careful mapmaking. Kezra unrolled the three heavy, cloth-backed thick parchment folios she had carried out of the Needlehouse archive, weighting down the curling corners with smooth, flat river stones Fellis fetched from the water tank overflow. Beside them, spread across the dark pine frame stand, lay Davren’s field sketches. It was rough sheets of grey wrapping paper and starch-stiffened mine linen covered in charcoal strokes, hematite chalk, and salt-smudges.
The visual contrast between the two sets of drawings was striking. Nym Correl’s century-old corps plates had been engraved with tiny care onto copper sheets, then hand-rubbed with soot and shellac to produce crisp, hairline contours that recorded every bench, drainage adit, and load-bearing pier of the northern massif. Davren’s sketches were the hurried observations of a solitary scout working with cold fingers under a threatening sky. But Kezra lined up the two map point grids. Then, the lines began to lock together like wood slot and wooden peg.
“Look at the northern massif’s foundation,” Kezra directed, her brass-tipped metal pen tracing the lower edge of the corps plate. “Nym Correl didn’t survey a natural ridge. A hundred years ago, the corps engineers carved two matching, artificially leveled bedrock shelves out of the living hard speckled granite. Each bench measures exactly one thousand and twenty-four paces on a side—the maximum physical envelope of a Horizon-scale parcel.”
