Heavy iron-shod boots hit the flooded footing behind them with a bone-shaking splash that sent gray foam washing over Len Vey’s shoulders.
Melli Dorn dropped into the waist-deep water like a falling anvil. Her heavy leather kiln apron was soaked black, the bib smeared with soot and fresh lime paste, but in her thick, calloused hands she carried a five-foot pinch bar forged from eight-sided tool steel. Behind her came two quarry riggers from the lower terraces. Varner, an old limestone driller with scarred forearms. A younger wedge-man named Kester—carrying an eight-foot ash pry-pole and three deep-water lengths of forged link chain.
Melli had worked the reverberatory kilns of the Salt Ward since her ninth winter. Her hands were broad, the palms covered in pale, insensible scars where molten cullet had splashed across her skin. But she possessed a gut, physical understanding of crushing weight. She had spent thirty years watching thirty-ton glass lehrs expand and contract under heat stress. She knew the bending limit of every timber and iron strap in the province.
“Clear the flank, Len!” Melli’s voice roared through the roar of escaping steam, hard and ferocious as a trip-hammer. “Varner, drop the chain around the pier ledge-stone! Kester, get the ash pole under the center notch! Heave on three!”
