The morning frost of Day 106 lay thick and white across the dry thistle stalks along the northern approach trail, crunching under the heavy, nailed boots of twenty basin quarrymen. Down in the common hall sick room, watchwoman Cressa rested in a clean wool smock with her left arm strapped firmly to her ribs, sipping Paxa’s bitter willow-bark brew. But up on the cold northern shoulder of the defile, there was no time for rest.
Kezra Venn stood with her back to the rising sun. Her breath curled in dense white plumes as she unrolled the large brass-rubbed survey plate against the side of a granite boulder. Beside her, Voss spat on his calloused hands, leaning his weight against an eight-foot ash pry-bar.
Before them rose the Northern Berm. It was a staggering work of royal high-pressure building from two hundred years past. An artificial ridge two hundred and fifty-six paces long, fifty paces broad at the base, and rising thirty feet above the valley floor in three battered courses of dressed granite cut stone blocks backed by a core of compacted ice-slow till. Originally designed to deflect spring flash-floods away from the lower lime adits, it sat seventy paces east of the turnpike. An idle, moss-grown giant that did nothing to hinder Captain Hest Vale’s scouts.
