The hundred-and-sixty-pace gallery opening was an ancient arched portal, twelve feet wide and fifteen feet high, cut through the sheer eastern cliff of the mountain stone base. Outside the opening lay the frozen void of the gorge. There, the winter night wind whistled through the jagged canyon two hundred paces below the castle walls.
Spanning the forty-foot deep gap between this underground gallery and an abandoned royal ore-smelter platform on the opposite cliff face was a massive heavy-duty service bridge. The bridge was a building relic from the early mining era. Two heavy wrought-iron lattice roof beams, four feet deep, supporting a roadway of thick, weathered oak timbers bound with iron strapping. Heavy timber handrails flanked the deck, and overhead, iron cross-braces tied the two roof beams into a rigid, load-bearing box.
Kezra Venn stepped onto the stone doorstep of the portal. She held her safety lamp close to the bridge’s eastern anchor plate. Her heart sank with immediate, technical dismay.
Under Rule #2 of cartographic exchanges, every fixed structure, stonework wall, timber beam, and metal tie-rod belonging to a parcel must fit wholly and fully within its surveyed boundary planes. A parcel couldn’t share load-bearing members with an uninspected neighboring mass. If a nonstop bridge truss or stonework tie crossed the boundary seam, the bonded book would reject the circuit instantly, identifying the load-bearing rule-break as an open clockwork fault.
