Down on Level Five of the Quarry, the mounting of Melli Dorn’s sixteen heat-proof glass heat panels was conducted with the quiet, respectful focus of masons setting an altar stone in a besieged cathedral.
The pit floor had been cleared of silt down to the bed of dry, crushed quartzite. Over this foundation, sixty stonecutters, working with wooden pry-bars and padded canvas slings. He laid the sixteen glass plates into their linked steel grid. Each plate rested on a bed of lead washers and vulcanized hemp seal ring-rope, designed to absorb the tiny spreading of the stone when forty thousand degrees of heat star-fire vented through the central chimney pipe.
Edda stood on her wooden check stool. Her broken fingers were tucked into her leather sling. Her right hand held a twelve-inch brass spirit-level. “Check the height on Panel Seven,” she commanded, her voice ringing off the damp limestone walls. “A tiny fraction of an inch low on the northeast lug. Jarek, drive a copper thin wedge under the pipe rim.”
Jarek Thrum, his fractured wrist bandaged tight with linen strips, tapped a wedge of sheet copper beneath the steel frame with a boxwood mallet. The sharp metal clink bounced off the high vaulting. The bubble inside Edda’s brass tube crept sideways and centered itself between the two etched lines.
