The ruins of Val-Mora looked like a cut granite tooth thrust upward through a black wound in the earth.
Tomas stood beside Nessa on the crest of the peat ridge, two miles out from the roadhead. The wind blew cold and raw from the north. It carried the sharp, reedy whistle of dead cattails and the underlying sourness of rotten-egg steam. Before them, across a half-mile of quaking mire, the castle wall loomed like a shipwrecked galleon frozen in stone.
Once, sixty arm-lengths of dressed cut stone stonework had guarded the border crossings between the Marchlands and the highland cantons. Now, two-thirds of the keep lay swallowed by sixty feet of soaked peat. The great northern corner tower had broken off at the foundation. Its tumbled blocks formed an underwater reef beneath the black water. The main gatehouse, built of dense pink granite blocks mortared with wet lime plaster and crushed fiery volcanic cement, slanted at a severe, unnatural angle—thirty-one degrees off upright.
Nessa knelt in the damp moss. Her eye was pressed to the sighting tube of her brass level-transit. She adjusted the milled brass thumb-screws with deliberate, calloused fingers. Every few moments, she paused, reached for her jointed boxwood rod. Then she made a crisp pencil stroke in her sheepskin field notebook.
