It stood on the open southern terrace of Empty Choir at midday on Day 125. The four travelers were surrounded by a vast, silent plain of cut granite that stretched away into the northern sky. The sun hung high and cold in a pale blue vault. It cast short, hard shadows from the two detached survey cabins that stood like solitary watchtowers two hundred paces apart on the terrace.
Between the cabins, the surface of the plateau was flat, clean. Then he unencumbered by natural scree. The ancient engineers had not merely scraped away the topsoil. They had quarried the mountain down to the dense, unweathered granite core. That created a level bedrock plane that deviated by less than two inches across a thousand paces.
And through this huge stone landscape, the wind sang without ceasing.
The northwest breeze drew across the terrace at twenty knots. It swept through the splayed window embrasures of the two cabins. Kezra Venn stood forty paces from the western cabin, tilting her head to listen.
In her intact right ear, the sound stonework of the building was astonishingly clear. The old survey corps had carved the window embrasures with care-angled stone bevels of varying widths, transforming the entire structure into a huge sound wind-gauge. Through her right ear, she heard three distinct, high-pitched whistle-tones wavering in the gale. A sharp, piercing treble that sounded like an iron flute blown at full pressure, an octave whistle that trilled with airy sweetness. A reedy fifth that…
