The first pale grey light of dawn was washing across the northern approach to Alderfast. That turned the frost on the willow scrub to dull pewter.
Kezra Venn stood at the base of the huge castle wall of earth and bedrock that she had moved eight days earlier. Across the mouth of the defile, the Northern Berm (Circuit 36) rose like a castle wall thirty feet high, two hundred and fifty-six paces wide, and two hundred and fifty-six paces deep. Its outward face was a sheer, stepped escarpment of dressed granite stone retaining walls and compacted ice-slow till, so massive that sixty Cairn Host pikemen had halted before it in helpless frustration on Day 110.
At the southeastern corner of the berm, resting upon a flat ledge of outcropping bedrock four paces outside the legal outer edge seam, lay the main cut-stone corner anchor she had chiseled with her own mallet on Day 109.
Adra Pike, Yseld Arken, Paxa Sel, and miner Voss stood on the packed gravel road ten paces behind her. Their breath mingling in was pale plumes against the cold mountain air. Fellis Dain knelt beside the anchor stone, a heavy mason’s cold-chisel held ready in his uninjured right hand. He waited for Kezra’s word.
