Melli Dorn was not satisfied with a fallen gate. She had spent twenty years running the annealing lehrs in Salt Ward. There, four tons of molten quartz dust would find any crack in a firebrick lining. She knew that an obstacle left half-secured was merely an invitation to disaster. A drop-gate suspended only by its own weight in a stone groove could be lifted by four determined men with timber levers, or forced aside with a screw-jack if the central guard brought up heavy equipment from the repair sheds.
“Edda,” Melli grunted. He stepped up to the snubbing post with her canvas-wrapped hands resting on her hips. “Give me the six-pound sledge and the long spacer. We’re going to weld this channel with cold steel.”
From her heavy leather tool bag, Edda pulled a three-foot bar of forged hard steel. An old kiln spacer that had been cooled in whale oil until its edges were as hard as a cold chisel. It was an inch thick, two inches wide, with a narrowed wedge machined into its nose, scored with dark tempering lines that showed where the metal had been drawn to straw-color in the fire.
Melli inspected the guide channel of the drop-gate frame. The frame had been made thirty years ago from two-inch charcoal-iron angle plates, anchored into the dressed dark rock stonework of the tunnel with four three-quarter-inch drift pins. The sliding rail of the gate was jammed tight against the bottom doorstep. But there was a quarter-inch…
