The diamond metal pen on Giles Croft’s central earth-measuring seismograph didn’t waver by a hairsbreadth.
For forty-eight nonstop hours, the smoked-paper drum rotated beneath the instrument’s brass arm, tracing a line so straight, true, and level that it looked as though it had been scored with a master builder’s steel rule.
The tremors had stopped.
Across thirty miles of the Ironfang Subduction Zone, the fifty-two thousand tons of injected graphite-bentonite slurry had done its work.
The locked earth-shaking plate had settled smoothly into its deep-rock cradle, relieved of the friction that had threatened to tear the continent apart.
Giles sat at his wide drafting desk in the town building hall, reviewing the geotechnical monitoring reports with Master Mason Orson Briggs and Lady Millicent Croft.
“Zero foundation settlement recorded across all town structures, Giles,” Orson reported with a broad, beaming grin.
“We checked the height pins on the twenty grain silos, the four Weather Pyramids, and the riverport locks.
