The tenth beat of the warning chime didn’t sound like iron striking stone. It rose from the three cut-stone corner anchors Kezra Venn had chiselled into the living native stone base of the mountain, traveling upward through the soles of her boots as a low, sub-heard tremor that shook behind her cheekbones and set the brass rings of her sheath buzzing against her belt. Her brass-tipped sounding rod was already seated securely in the leather loop at her hip, withdrawn on the ninth beat exactly as Paxa Sel had drilled into her memory during forty days of patient alpine ascents. Her left ear registered only the familiar flat, unchanging hum that had lived in her skull since the Saltglass Reach exchange. But her sound right ear caught the crisp snap of cold mountain air across the flat stone slabs. Her eyes held Fellis Dain’s steady right hand. It held the square white paddle aloft above the mouth of the upkeep lane.
Beside the lane wall, within sixteen paces of the north-lined up corner mark, Kezra opened her palms across the open leaves of her bonded survey notebook. The rag paper was warm against her calloused fingertips. It smelled faintly of sheep fat and old dark oak-ink. Across the forty-four-character grid of the page, the two destination lines burned with the clean, steady green light of legal sign-off: Circuit Forty-Four at Stonewake Citadel, and Circuit Forty-Three at the Empty Choir plateau eighteen miles to the north. Every parameter had been walked…
