At ten o’clock on the twenty-second morning of the third week, Cira Vey stood in the open yard behind the wheelwright’s shop in the upper Tram Ward. She watched an apprentice blacksmith drive the final cold-rivet into the iron tire of her delivery cart.
The sound of the peening hammer was a sharp, rhythmic ringing that carried across the brick viaducts: CLINK-CLANK-TONG. With every blow, the soft iron head of the rivet spread outward into its countersunk recess in the tire. He locked the forged steel rim irrevocably against the curved felloe of seasoned mountain ash.
Kester Holt, his leather apron stiffened with axle grease and coal dust, wiped his forehead with a blackened forearm, stepped back. Then it sighted down the wheel with his single good eye.
“Spin her, Joram,” Holt ordered.
The apprentice seized the ash spokes, giving the wheel a powerful downward heave. The five-foot wooden wheel spun on its oiled spindle with a quiet, zero-drag whirr, the iron tire running true against the chalked test-block with less than a sixteenth of an inch of lateral wobble. There was no grinding friction in the hub, no loose chatter in the mortises, and no creak from the ash felloes.
