Foreman Eren Tal carefully removes the tiled saint panel without cracking a single baked-clay piece. Meanwhile, Ada checks the bronze spindle and Jo Saye’s waxed coats protect the workers from the hot spray. She stood inside the stone niche behind the saint panel on the dungeon stair landing. Foreman Eren Tal, Ada Morland, and Hesta set the heavy twenty-four-inch cast-iron hand-wheel and three-inch sea-court-bronze gate spindle hidden inside the dry-stone niche, along with Jo Saye’s heavy double-waxed marsh-reed coats where the lantern light fell cleanest across the work surface. Meanwhile, Pella Rook and thirteen-year-old Tavi checked the entry under the heading of Removing the Panel and Turning the Spindle.
The technical core of removing the panel and turning the spindle needed backing out the four rusted brass wood-screws holding the cedar tile-backing board rather than smashing the tiles with a crowbar, then lubricating the 1690 bronze acme threads with animal fat and piercing oil before turning the wheel two-handed. Throughout this phase of the scalding grey-water surge beneath Hesta’s Southern Bridge washhouse, the crew held fast to treating an old vaulted dungeon as a civic plumbing problem rather than a monster lair. Every brass fitting, every stitched seam. Every thirty-minute lunch crossing had to answer to physical measurement rather than guild politics.
