The afternoon of Day 158 was bathed in a mellow, pale gold light that made the dry limestone walls along the pasture road glow like weathered ivory.
The party was walking through familiar country now. The jagged, forbidding peaks of the Spine had flattened into a distant, hazy blue line along the eastern horizon, resembling a low wall of sleeping clouds rather than an impassable barrier of stone and ice. Here, in the gentle upland pastures three miles east of Kilnstep, the earth rolled in broad, lazy terraces of dry rye grass and scrub juniper, bounded by waist-high fieldstone walls that had stood since the founding of the pottery guilds.
At mid-afternoon, the road crested a dry limestone rise. Kezra Venn brought her boots to a halt on the packed gravel.
Directly ahead, situated at the widening where the pasture lane met the old county cart road, stood the disused roadside weighing station.
It was a simple, box-shaped open-sided pavilion built of rough-dressed limestone piers supporting a weathered cedar-shingle roof. In the center of the flat stone slab floor sat the heavy iron weigh-beam, its balance weights resting in their pitted lead cradles. For ages, wagon drivers hauling wagons of raw grey clay from the southern river pits had stopped at this platform to certify their tonnage before entering the town road into Kilnstep, ensuring that overloaded axles didn’t shatter the township under-road drains.
