Thirty paces outside Empty Choir’s southeastern corner, sheltered within a deep, horse-shoe-shaped nook of the mountain crag, lay the ancient survey corps’ upkeep quarry.
Voss and Yseld pushed through the wind-blown snowdrifts blocking the entrance. Then, they found a scene that looked as if the quarrymen had laid down their hammers only yesterday. Neatly stacked beneath an overhanging granite top door beam were four long rows of pre-dressed granite coping blocks, each cut to standardized half-handspan and full-handspan thicknesses.
Every block was dressed with square, bush-hammered edges. Then he centered on its top face was a clean, box-shaped lifting-lewis slot designed to receive an iron hoisting hook.
“Look at this,” Voss laughed aloud, running his leather glove over the smooth grey stone. “Standardized replacement coping. The old corps knew that frost would chew on these high perimeters over the hundreds of years. They didn’t leave it to chance. They cut a depot of spare stone and stacked it right beside the bench.”
Kezra knelt beside the stacks. She pulled out her brass measuring tongs to measure the block dimensions. “Four feet long, two feet wide. Exactly six inches thick for the half-handspan course, twelve inches for the full course. They match the original outer edge coping stones to the line.”
