A bottleneck in transport public works was the true assassin of an empire.
An army could survive casualties on the battlefield, but an economy couldn’t survive a queue of forty ships waiting for four docking slips.
Lord Giles Croft stood upon the temporary wooden work frames hanging eight hundred feet above the valley floor. He held a high-pressure torque wrench.
Behind him, the granite face of Grey Crag plunged vertically into the mist like a titan’s wall.
Before him, twelve massive stone cantilever arms extended outward into the clouds. It formed the load-bearing bones of Berths Five through Twenty.
Each ledge-stone was assembled from linked blocks of dense iron-hard metal-veined granite, three feet thick and six feet long, weighing four tons apiece.
Master Duncan Stone-Splitter hung in a rope harness beside Giles, his hands coated in gray high-pressure cement paste.
“The stone blocks are seated dry on lead thin wedges, Lord Giles,” Duncan shouted over the whistle of the high-sky wind.
