A single animal fat candle with a curved tin reflector threw a bright, packed cone of yellow light across the cobbler’s corner of Eren Tal’s workshop. The air smelled of oak-bark tanned harness leather, warm neat’s-foot oil, brass filings, and cold charcoal damp from the banked stove. On the heavy elm block sat two curved wooden elbow lasts, polished smooth by decades of shaping draymen’s sleeves.
Master Tailor Dima Fen leaned over the elm block with a revolving hole punch and a brass-headed rivet setter. His eyes were stinging from hours of fine close work in the flickering candlelight, his calloused thumbs darkened with neat’s-foot oil. Beside him, Pella Rook braced a cast-iron mandrel between her knees. Meanwhile, Auditor Varo Nenn sat on an upturned nail keg by the stove, cross-checking the serial marks of the Sluice Crown’s bronze pipe castings against a bundle of foundry invoices.
Sharp granite edges inside the drainage tunnels would chew through raw canvas in two days of crawling without tough leather articulation. Anyone crawling on their stomach through the Silt Gallery had to drag their full body weight across rough-quarried granite inverts crusted with sharp stone-glass crystals and acidic hard pipe-crust.
Dima molded the damp, oiled horsehide cups over wooden turning lasts, shaping them to the contours of Korr’s bent elbows. Using his brass fine-scale measuring tongs and a steel stitch awl, Dima Fen shaped three-and-a-half tiny fraction of an inch thick harness scrap, skived down at the outer edge to prevent catching on…
