Ulvan Dret leaned back against the granite low roof wall of the eastern turret, his breath catching in his throat with a dry, papery rattle that made Paxa Sel pause on the spiral stairs below. With slow, painful movements, the fifty-four-year-old mapper unbuckled the three heavy leather straps securing his left gaiter. The stiff boiled leather fell away onto the flat stone slabs. It exposed a wool trouser leg that had been slit to the knee and re-stitched with coarse saddler’s twine.
He rolled the wool up to his mid-thigh. In the harsh, flickering orange light of the hard coal fire bowls, Kezra Venn and Paxa Sel looked down at the ruined joint. The kneecap had been crushed fully, replaced by a thick, purplish mass of stringy scar tissue that bound the thigh bone and shin bone together in a rigid, unmoving fusion at an angle of thirty degrees. Two jagged white lines crossed the skin where bone splinters had burst through the flesh years earlier. The thigh muscles muscle above the joint had withered into a thin, wasted cord no thicker than a child’s wrist.
The anatomy of a cave-in was a familiar horror to anyone raised near the mines of the Spine. Kezra had seen old quarrymen in Kilnstep whose legs dragged behind them like wooden poles. Their knees shattered by fell blocks in the limestone workings. But seeing the damage laid bare on a royal map maker—a man whose entire craft depended upon pacing grids. He climbed…
