Forty paces inside the sub-basement gallery, the ancient dressed limestone of the ferry vault ended suddenly against a rough, unplaned boarding of yellow deal planks nailed floor-to-ceiling across the archway. It wasn’t town upkeep work. The timber hoarding had been thrown up in secret behind the locked museum doors, caulked with black thick tar pitch to hide the glare of work-lanterns and the hiss of high-pressure steam from the street above.
By eleven o’clock, the smoke from the academy fire bowls had turned the quayside air into a yellow, eye-stinging fog that smelled of burning coal-tar and volatilized sulfur.
Eren Tal stood at the corner of the timber wharf, his woolen muffler pulled up to his nose, his eyes fixed on the lower boat ramp thirty paces out.
On the granite low roof wall directly above the outer river grate, four academy smiths in leather aprons were working two pairs of double-acting bellows. The coals in the iron fire bowls were glowing with a white-hot, dazzling bright glare, and resting in the fire were two heavy cast-iron crucibles, each filled with two hundredweight of molten mountain lead that bubbled and scummed with gray waste scum.
Beside the fire bowls stood Captain Corvin Hest, checking his pocket turnip-watch with rhythmic, insolent patience.
