The three torn leaves of calfskin parchment lay across Kezra Venn’s knees, fluttering in the icy draught of the eastern air-flow turret. Unlike the neat, lit up five-drilled shaft chart that the high court clerks had drawn for Krail’s investors, these sheets were real field drafts. Stained with yellow animal fat grease, thumb-smudged with dark rock dust, and bearing the jagged, hurried pencil annotations of a land-mapper working in freezing underground damp.
Kezra picked up the first sheet, holding it close to the mica chimney of Paxa’s safety lamp. The drawing represented the upright cross-section of the eastern air-flow stair. The very turret whose square-cut treads wound downward beneath their boots into the mountain root. As her eyes followed the lines, her heart gave a steady, rhythmic leap of skilled satisfaction. The difference between institutional fraud and honest mapmaking was right away visible in the ink.
From the turret threshold at zero paces down to the two-hundred-and-ten-pace landing, every single stone was drawn in firm, nonstop, unhesitating black ink. Ulvan had recorded the exact upright risers: twenty paces of flight, a three-pace landing, a ninety-degree turn, and another twenty paces of descent. Every tool niche, every iron torch sconce, every stonework contact between upper limestone and middle baked flint-rock was measured with straight-line offsets, with marginal soundings recorded in feet and inches.
