In the cobbled corner outside Sister Merrow’s back kitchen and the Nine Lanterns pump, the immediate matter of the woodcut of the lightning wrench centered upon a damp, cheaply inked broadsheet pamphlet stamped with a melodramatic woodcut of a towering woman hurling thunderbolts into a sewer grate. News of the witnessed intake walk spreads through Lowbank. A ballad seller prints a woodcut showing fifty-two-year-old Ada Morland as a ten-foot giantess wielding a wrench of forked lightning. While Thirteen-year-old Tavi and Pella Rook examined the physical evidence at hand, Foreman Eren Tal and Sister Merrow kept the workshop register open so every measurement and spoken condition could be entered without embellishment.
The technical core of the woodcut of the lightning wrench needed measuring the actual fourteen-inch brass Bourdon pressure gauge and the three-eighths-inch hemp packing cord that Ada had really used on the under-road drain walk. Throughout this phase of the ballad-seller’s exaggeration and the flood of merchant requests, the crew held fast to triage discipline over public spectacle. Every brass fitting, every stitched seam. Every thirty-minute lunch crossing had to answer to physical measurement rather than guild politics.
“He’s selling them for a half-farthing apiece by the fish stalls, Pella!” Tavi said, holding the smudged woodcut flat on the pine bread table. “The ballad singer is telling the barge crews that Mistress Ada stands ten feet high in iron boots and melts limestone blockages by striking them with a bolt of blue sky-fire.”
