Before Kezra Venn could look down into the dark deep pit of Windpit’s shaft, she had a debt of measurement to pay on the surface.
She stood inside the stone headhouse, her sounding rod in her hand. She looked out through the open southern doorway toward the vast white tiered arena of the snow saddle. Outside, the wind scoured the granite stone bases they had spent two hours clearing from the drifts. The outer edge cords were pegged, the four corner markers exposed. The leveling line was stretched taut between the bronze benchmark pins.
“Leveling check,” Kezra called out, stepping out onto the cleared apron.
Voss and Paxa held the water-tube level. A sixty-foot flexible hose of oiled pig-bladder fitted with graduated glass sight-tubes at each end, filled with tinted alcohol to keep the fluid from freezing solid in the high mountain air. Voss held the zero-tube against the southwest origin stone base, his thumb resting beside the etched reference ring. Meanwhile, Paxa carried the distant tube sixteen paces north along the western wall.
“Level at western stone base,” Paxa announced, squinting through her round glasses at the purple alcohol knee pad. “Two inches above the foundation chamfer. Exactly matching the origin datum.”
