Melli Dorn was not a quarryman. But she was a forewoman who understood the heat swelling of metal and the brutal physics of hot steam better than any salaried engineer in the Provincial Survey Office.
Geth Marr’s roar echoed down from the narrow high walkway. Then, calling for the main repair team to enter the water, Melli was already standing at the foot of the overhead frame ladder on Level Five. She had stripped off her heavy leather fire apron, kicked off her clogs of cured alder-wood. Then she bound her thick woolen trousers tight around her calves and ankles with strips of oiled sailcloth to prevent the freezing current from ballooning the fabric and sweeping her off her feet.
On both her forearms, extending from wrist to elbow, the skin was raw and blistered. Second-degree burns sustained twelve hours earlier when a pre-heating burner backfired in the salt kilns. She had coated the raw flesh with a thick layer of sheep fat and bound it with clean linen strips. But the damp cold of the pit made the nerve endings throb with painful, rhythmic heat.
“Melli, you’ve been breathing sulfur smoke for twelve hours straight,” Ivara Quill called down from the intermediate staging, leaning over the spruce rail with an iron lantern. “You can barely close your hands on a wrench! Let the younger stonecutters take the water! Varner and Venn have the strength!”
