Dawn over Waystation Five broke through a thick, gray mantle of low-height clouds that promised snow before noon.
Tomas Reed sat at the stripped oak desk in the station keeper’s office. His horn lantern flickered as the morning draft crept through the cracked sashes. Before him lay the two great legal instruments of his mission: the closed muster roll of the Fourteenth Battalion. The opened Endowment Ledger of the Sunder Pass.
Beside him, Nessa Vale finished drawing the master height chart of the seven waystations on a sheet of heavy drafting thick parchment, using her brass rule and India ink.
“Seven shelters,” Nessa said, her voice dropping into its precise, analytical rhythm. “Station One: roof collapsed, timber stolen. Station Two: west wall buckled, lime plaster fraud. Station Three: western stonework snapped, zero rations. Station Four: medical relay stripped, dead unburied. Station Five: inside fixtures looted, coal bin empty. Station Six: buried under avalanche debris. Station Seven: underground stronghold sealed and abandoned.”
Tomas dipped his reed pen into his warmed inkpot.
On a fresh quire of Crown stationery, he drafted the formal Instrument of Custodial Inquest for the Alpine Waystation Repair Endowment.
He cited the original Royal Charter of Year Twelve, the lawful obligations of the Ministry of War. The twenty-thousand-crown embezzlement carried out by Commissioner Brant and Contractor Moros between Year Fifty-Four and Year Sixty-Four.
