The evening horn sounded from the high keep turret as the sun’s last rays turned the snowy peaks above Stonewake into ridges of burnished copper. Across the lower ward, iron lanterns were being hoisted on long poles at every street corner, their dim amber flames struggling against the dropping mountain gloom.
Thirty paces past the farrier’s forge. There, the service road curved toward the entrance of the deep mine drifts, lay the second potential survey site Kezra had identified: the bare stone supply pad.
It was an open, paved platform sixteen paces square, built of massive slabs of dressed hard speckled granite laid flush with the surrounding gravel. For fourteen months, the Cairn Host’s quartermasters had used it as a staging area for heavy freight—stacking spruce pit-props for the mine galleries, iron hoop-straps for the coopers, and sixty-pound sacks of lump charcoal from the lower kiln pits.
By late afternoon, however, the pad had been swept fully clear.
Master Garrow’s laborers, working under the blunt instructions Corporal Brand had passed along from the Marshal, had hauled the last bundles of mine timbers thirty paces west into the covered wagon sheds. Now, under the gathering twilight, the platform sat fully bare. A clean, unencumbered sixteen-pace square of ancient royal stonework.
