Dawn broke cold and raw over Crown-Reach, painting the eastern sky the color of a bruised plum.
In the center of the Weaver’s Row market square, where cabbage carts and fishmonger benches had been pushed back against the tenement walls, Nessa Vale stood over her heavy oak tripod like a general surveying a battlefield. Its steel-shod legs were driven deep between the solid mountain stone. Atop the tripod rested her prized instrument. An eighteen-inch brass fine-scale transit crafted forty years ago in the Lower Reach, its tubes and spirit levels gleaming under the lantern light.
Tomas Reed knelt beside the southern leg. He held a chalked weighted drop-line centered over a brass datum pin hammered into the cobbles at midnight.
“Level,” Tomas said, checking the transverse spirit tube. “The bubble is dead center between the score lines.”
Nessa adjusted the brass collar clamp of her dual-cone hearing horn, angling the flared bell toward the stone wall behind them to cut out the howling river draft. She pressed her hazel eye to the rubber eye-cup of the transit telescope. She turned the knurled tangent screw with micro-metric care.
“Sile,” she said, her voice clipped. “Clear those washerwomen from the north line. Their laundry fires are throwing heat shimmer across the lower sightline. I can’t read the fine-scale through the smoke.”
