The trench beneath the laundry floor was barely four feet wide, walled with blackened river limestone that had absorbed a century of animal fat grease and coal smoke. Eren Tal crouched in the muck, his shoulders braced against the slippery stonework, his knees sinking three inches into wet river silt. Above his head hung the massive four-hundred-pound cast-iron drainage grate, tilted at a precarious thirty-degree angle where the rising river ribbon had shoved it from its stone rebate. A single iron crowbar, jammed under the hinge lug by a panicked stoker, was the only thing preventing the iron slab from dropping like a guillotine.
Eren’s palms were raw from handling wet ash balks without gloves, the rough grain biting into calluses hardened by twenty years of truing wagon wheels. Sweat stung his eyes, stinging with the rotten-egg fumes bubbling up from the open drain. He took a heavy wooden mallet in his right hand and tapped the face of his main ash shore. He listened to the sound return through the wood. A dull, hollow thud meant rot or loose footing. A sharp, ringing crack meant bedrock. The ring was clean, but the stone beneath the doorstep was slick with slime.
