The inner gatehouse of Stonewake Citadel was a vaulted tunnel of dressed limestone, fifty paces long and twelve paces wide. He was flanked by twin murder holes. Then he closed at the inner bailey by a second drop-gate of iron-banded oak.
The air inside the archway was damp. It smelled of horse dung, burning coal, and the wet woolen cloaks of twenty guard post guards standing at attention along the side walls. In the center of the passage, where an iron fire bowl cast flickering shadows against the barrel-vaulted ceiling, Chief Cartographer Ulvan Dret stood waiting behind a three-legged surveying stand.
At fifty-four years of age, Ulvan looked older than his years. His grey beard was trimmed close. But his shoulders were rounded by thirty years of bending over drafting tables. His left leg leaned stiffly against the tripod. The legacy of an old gallery collapse in the southern cantons that had fused his knee at thirty degrees. In his left hand he held an ivory drafting rule. In his right, a pair of brass dividers that had measured a thousand royal boundaries.
Thirty-five days earlier, in this very courtyard, Ulvan had handed Kezra a foundation profile containing five matching drilled shaft columns, hoping the inexperienced village girl would sign her name to the forgery so Marshal Krail’s relocation timetable could proceed without awkward questions. Instead, she had unbolted the iron air-flow grille, climbed into the unmapped western rooms. Then she exposed the living human beings whose existence his copied…
