Ten feet above the lower landing, perched on the narrow iron upkeep narrow high walkway that ran beneath the freight exit, Ivara Quill knelt in the scalding drip, her sounding pole wedged tightly beneath her cut left armpit.
Her sound right hand held an eight-inch land-mapper’s scraping chisel, its hardened carbon-steel edge jammed deep into the mortar joint between two massive granite stone wall-brackets. The stone blocks projected twelve inches from the brick retaining wall, designed to carry the main downward thrust of the stairs’s upper flight.
Ivara twisted the chisel.
The lime mortar didn’t resist with the dry, gritty crunch of sound stonework. It gave way with a soft, sickening squelch, extruding from the joint like wet oat porridge. The mortar was hot to the touch, eighty degrees, fully broken down by the acidic sulfuric steam that had been pouring through the upper air-flow chimney pipes for the past forty minutes.
“Len!” Ivara roared down over the iron railing, her voice cutting through the hiss of the chimney pipes with the cold, unbending power of exact certainty. “The crushing force on the lower bracket is past fifteen hundred pounds! The lime has lost its chemical bond! The mortar is washing out in liquid streams!”
