Fifty paces past the Ancient Boundary Pylon, the shale promontory narrowed to a point no wider than a butcher’s bench.
Lin Tao halted at the very tip of the rock.
To his left, to his right, and directly ahead, the world ended. The dark stone fell away into an infinite, upright sheer that dropped into the black unrendered void. The air here was so thin and devoid of pressure that Lin Tao’s coat hung limp against his frame, untroubled by even the faintest heat draft.
He knelt at the edge, unslung his leather tool roll, and withdrew his land-mapper’s weighted drop-line.
The weighted drop-line consisted of a hundred paces of tuned star-iron wire wound around a brass spool, tipped with a six-ounce line weight forged from solid lead and tipped with star-white-gold. The brass housing was marked with fine-scale increments. It allowed Lin Tao to measure line bending down to a tenth of a tiny fraction of an inch.
Lin Tao checked the spool’s release ratchet, held the brass housing over the deep pit. Then he released the brake.
The lead weight dropped into the black void.
Under normal gravity, the line weight should have sped up downward. He unspooled wire at a rate of nine point eight meters per second squared until it struck rock or ran out of cable. But as Lin Tao watched through his augmented left eye, the line weight dropped exactly three paces. And halted dead in mid-air.
