The celebration of the marsh folk didn’t take the form of idleness or drunken revelry. It took the form of logging rigging. By the second hour after sunrise, the gravel apron of Checkpoint Three had become a staging ground for the greatest clockwork demolition in the history of the southern frontier.
Stretching east and west from the raised stone road for three unbroken miles stood the Great Palisade. Twenty feet of sharpened hemlock and heart-pine logs, twelve to eighteen inches thick, driven six feet into the levee mud and bound together by three courses of heavy level wales bolted with forged iron drift-pins. For twenty-five years, this wall had divided families, trapped farmers in the Sump, and cast its black shadow across the salt-fen.
Nessa Vale walked the base of the wall. She carried her folding land-mapper’s rod and a heavy chalk marker. “We don’t fell it at random, Sile,” Nessa directed, marking the main upright piles at forty-foot intervals with red chalk crosses. “Every timber section weighs sixteen tons. If we pull without cutting the top wales, the logs will bind against each other and snap the chains. We must saw through the level binders every three bays, creating independent falling sections.”
