The upkeep lane between the rear of Stonewake Citadel’s service wall and the native cliff face was a cold, narrow hall of shadow barely three paces wide. For fifty paces, it ran straight as a straight-line along the southwest boundary of the castle, its floor paved with coarse limestone cobbles embedded in lime mortar, sheltered from the howling alpine winds by eighty feet of solid stonework.
Kezra Venn walked twelve paces down the alley, her boot heels clicking softly against the stone. At her hip, the brass ferrules of her ash sounding rod tapped lightly against her belt sheath. In her left hand, she held the closed, waxed leather case of her bonded survey notebook, cold against her palm.
She halted before a square stone base of solid, bedded limestone that rose eighteen inches above the alley floor.
Chiselled into the top face of the stone base was a deep, clean earth-measuring benchmark: an equilateral triangle, six inches on each side, enclosing a central circular cup two inches wide and an inch deep. Streaming outward from the triangle’s apexes were three fine orientation lines, lined up exactly with True North, True East, and the earth-measuring baseline of the thousand-pace prism.
