With the coping stones leveled and the juniper taproots safely isolated outside the northern curb, Kezra Venn took her sounding rod from its leather holster. Then she stepped onto the sixteen-pace terrace of the second staging camp.
The wind had dropped slightly. But the air remained razor-sharp, freezing the moisture in her nostrils with every inhale. Behind her, Paxa Sel stood at the southern origin pin with the field notebook open to the progression ledger. Meanwhile, Voss leaned against his pry-bar beside the cleared under-road drain. She watched the survey with the quiet intensity of an experienced foreman.
“Pacing origin,” Kezra said aloud, her voice carrying clearly across the stone terrace.
She walked the southern outer edge first, sixteen paces from east to west. Her boots struck the frozen shale chips in four-pace intervals. At each quarter-width mark—four paces, eight paces, twelve paces, sixteen paces—she drove the hardened brass tip of her sounding rod through the surface gravel until it seated against the underlying rock.
She struck three measured blows against the rod’s butt with the heel of her palm: tap, tap, tap.
The return chimed through the ash shaft into her right hand. The upper layer of dolomitic limestone gave back a crisp, high-pitched deep ring that sang like fired fine china. Beneath it, eight paces down where Voss had exposed the under-road drain footing, the dark foliated flaky rock answered with a dense, muffled ring that shook steadily through the soles of her boots.
