Inside the covered heavy cart wagon, as it stood parked on the edge of the market cobblestones, Senior Surveyor Korr Var held his pocket brass magnifier over Eren Tal’s clockwork trip log. Beside him, Pella Rook was double-checking the fine-tuning notches on the spare brass shear-pins with a set of hardened steel feeler gauges.
The air under the tarpaulin smelled of cedar shavings, neat’s-foot oil. The dry, pleasant dust of pipe lime stored in canvas bags to weight the test frame stands. Outside, the steady drumming of autumn rain against the oiled canvas produced a soft, rhythmic patter that masked the murmur of the assembling crowd.
“Thirteen point eight inches,” Korr read from the log, his pen tracing the line drawn in dark oak-ink. “You declared fourteen inches as the total load-bearing limit for the lead basin. When the water column hit thirteen-eight, Eren pulled the cord without hesitating. The valve slammed shut in four tenths of a second.”
“Four tenths of a second,” Eren confirmed. He wiped a smudge of blue grease pencil from his thumb. “The brass dog dropped clean, the butterfly valve seated into its lead seal ring. The sound circuit was dead before the needle could bounce. If we had waited three seconds longer to ask permission, the back-pressure from Sorell’s second witness line would have fractured the lead welds and sprayed boiling mud into Pella’s eyes.”
