By midday on Day 107, the northern defile looked like an open-air stone quarry. While Voss’s miners continued their rhythmic bucket-hauling at the deep shafts, Adra Pike arrived with forty basin growers. Men, women, and older youths armed with wooden wheelbarrows, iron mattocks, and twenty-foot water-level troughs filled with colored salt water.
Kezra walked the outer edge of the Northern Berm with Yseld and Fellis, pacing the long, straight lines that defined the two-hundred-and-fifty-six-pace square. Under the ancient survey corps’ building standards, every Quarter-scale parcel was designed as an interchangeable sharp-angled prism, its boundaries edged with a distinctive three-stepped bedrock curb that allowed the moved stone to interlock seamlessly with its recipient foundation.
In their current state, however, neither the Northern Berm nor its southern counterpart could legally certify.
“Look at this sheep fold,” Adra said, stopping fifty paces along the eastern boundary of the berm where a rough dry-stone enclosure of mossy limestone boulders crossed the line. “Old Martin built this forty years ago to shelter his lambing ewes. It adds four feet of unmeasured dead weight right across the boundary seam. If your book tried to move this square right now, half the wall would shear off and leave a jagged lip.”
