Bram Ash didn’t hesitate. His shoulder slammed against the cold, whitewashed stonework of the wall bracket, his fingers hooking through the rough cast-iron trip ring.
The metal was coated in a thick, flaking crust of orange rust that bit into the calluses of his palms like broken glass. For half a heartbeat, the pin refused to yield, held fast by twenty years of settled lime scale and dried machine animal fat. Bram planted his right boot against an iron floor beam, threw his entire two-hundred-pound frame backward. Then it pulled with the desperate, unthinking strength he had once used to haul drowning wagon drivers from the River weir.
With a high, screeching shriek of shearing rusting, the iron pin snapped.
The thirty-pound pig-iron balance weight plunged six feet down the upright wall guide. It struck the stop spring with an ear-splitting metal clang that sent a cloud of white dust billowing across the floorboards. High in the vaulted shadows of the brick ceiling, the heavy overhead pulleys groaned on their bronze pins, singing a harsh, ungreased song as forty feet of linked chain whipped through the pulley wheels.
The four-foot brass chandelier dropped like a falling anvil, arresting its descent three arm-lengths above the center aisle with a violent shudder that rattled the welded frame.
