“Before anyone swings a hammer against that wall,” Eren Tal said, wading forward through the two-foot water with two six-foot ash timber shores carried across his broad shoulders, “we prop the top door beam.”
He stopped beside Ada and Corvin at the twenty-eight-meter mark. He set the butt ends of the squared ash timbers onto the only solid limestone stone base leftover on the north margin of the floor. His leather apron was dark with sweat and river spray, his jaw set with the uncompromising caution of Lowbank’s logistics lead.
“If those granite blocks are only a four-inch veneer,” Eren continued, squinting up at the mortar joints near the barrel vault’s crown, “pulling the lower course without wooden props the top will drop eight hundred pounds of loose dressed stone onto our heads. Pella, hold the heel block. Judge, since your coat is already wet, hold this lantern steady.”
Corvin Hest didn’t object. He took the horn lantern from Pella with both wet hands, bracing his elbow against his ribs to keep the yellow flame steady on the upper stonework joint. Meanwhile, Pella knelt in the swirling thirty-nine-degree water to position a flat oak sole-plate against the floor stone.
With four crisp, ringing blows of his wooden maul, Eren drove twin oak folding wedges beneath the ash shores until the timbers bit firmly under the upper granite header course, transferring the dead weight of the upper arch safely down into the solid sidewall stone base. He plucked the taut timber…
