With the scalding lateral spray safely baffled downward into the floor pool by Jo Saye’s greased canvas-and-wool sleeve, the upper recess behind the breached granite weir cleared of blinding steam. The air remained fiercely hot—hovering near forty-four degrees beneath the limestone vault—and smelled heavily of wet sheep’s wool, boiled sheep fat, sulfur salt water, and the metal tang of exposed glowing-bronze.
At the twenty-eight-meter mark, Jo Saye stood on the raised northern stone base, checking the tension on the hemp lashings Eren had tied to the iron wall brackets. Every three seconds, as the high-pressure pulse from the High Terraces hammered down the upright drop-pipe, the wet canvas hood bent outward by half an inch, absorbed the moving shock across its slanted ash-ribbed gussets. Then it discharged the 130-degree water in a tame, upright sheet between the flat stone slabs.
“The welt seam will hold for another forty minutes at this pressure, Ada,” Jo said. He wiped the water drops from her wire-rimmed glasses with the dry hem of her cardigan beneath her apron. “After that, the animal fat dressing will start to leach out of the flax fibers under nonstop fifty-degree wash. You’ll get weeping through the stitch holes. Do what you need to do with the ironwork, love, and don’t dawdle.”
