The late afternoon chill deepened rapidly as the sun touched the jagged crags of the western rim. That turned the limestone cliffs from bone-white to deep violet. On the upper bench outside the stone tool shelter, the wind gusted in sharp, cold flurries, whistling through the dry larch shakes of the roof and stirring the pale curls of cedar shavings around Fellis’s folding stool. Down in the basin, shadows pooled in the terraced hollows like cold ink, though the high headframes of the northern silver mines still caught the last thin brass gleam of daylight.
Kezra Venn knelt on the flat bedrock, blowing the fine limestone dust from the third anchor triangle she had just chiseled into the rock. Her fingers were stiff with the evening frost, but her mallet work had been clean and true. Three matching equilateral triangles, each three inches across with its split central bar pointing true north, marked the bedrock apron just beyond the sixteen-pace outer edge.
Beside her, the two basin growers who had helped clear loose scree from the outer edge—young men named Jarek and Elan—stepped back three paces, their shoulders tense. Their eyes watched the chisel marks with an anxious, ingrained wariness.
