Before the first pale gray light of dawn touched the eastern crags on Day One Hundred and Thirty-Two, Kezra Venn walked out onto the frozen rim of Empty Choir to establish her outside corner anchors.
The wind had dropped during the early morning hours. That left the high plateau locked in a huge, breathless freeze. Every granite curb and weathered flat stone slab was rimed with white needle-frost that crunched sharply under her boots. She carried her heavy leather tool roll across her shoulder, containing her three-quarter-inch cold chisel of hardened hard steel, her two-pound round-headed iron mason’s mallet, a stiff horsehair clearing brush. A flask of neat whale oil to lubricate the stone cuts.
Voss walked beside her. He carried a small tin bucket of dry granite sand and a pine torch that cast a flickering, smoky circle of yellow light across the icy flat stone slabs.
“Rule four,” Voss said, his breath pluming like steam from a kettle as he spoke. “Three cut-stone anchor marks, cut into stable ground just outside the outer edge. Why outside, Kezra? Tell an old miner why you can’t just carve your mark on the center of the terrace.”
“Because when the parcel exchanges, everything inside the boundary moves,” Kezra answered, her voice steady in the crisp mountain air. “The soil, the flat stone slabs, the central small roof-dome, the two whistling shelters, and five hundred and twelve paces of underlying mountain foundation will vanish from this seat and appear at the Alderfast…
