Between seven and nine bells on the seventh night, a thick estuary fog rolled up from the Gray Rush boat ramp. That turned the animal fat streetlamps of Fish Street into dim, grease-haloed moons.
Pella Rook walked between the dripping timber overhangs carrying her brass-cased liquid silver heat gauge and survey book. Meanwhile, Foreman Eren Tal shouldered a six-foot ash leveling staff, two seasoned oak wooden props posts, and a heavy framing mallet.
Two paces behind them trotted thirteen-year-old Tavi, wearing Dima Fen’s heavy canvas apron over his wool smock and carrying a ruled clip-slate, a white soapstone pencil. A coil of braided hemp weighted drop-line.
At four in a row houses stepping down the slope from the Eastern Terrace retaining wall—Numbers 4, 7, 11, and 14 Fish Street—the cellar doors stood propped open with iron wedges waiting for them.
In the cooperage cellar at Number 4 and the animal fat chandlery at Number 7, the pattern was already clear.
Neither cellar flooded from the street wall or the harbor side. Instead, warm, stone-heavy water seeped up through a single slanted line of floor flags running northeast to southwest across the center of the foundations.
At Number 4, closest to the upper bluff, the liquid silver column settled at forty-one point five degrees. Thirty yards farther down the hill under Master Bren’s animal fat vats at Number 7, the reading climbed to forty-four degrees flat.
