While Captain Bram and his six town spear guards stood guard outside the Bay Four doorway to prevent any interference from the upper quadrangle, Pella Rook, Examiner Corvin Hest. Foreman Eren Tal gathered beneath the wall-mounted hoist housing. Senior Engineer Korr Var stood by the dark wood lectern with his pocket watch open, logging every minute of elapsed time and the exact reserve percentage on the Courtesy Arch so the Senate Hearing would have an unbroken chain of technical accounting.
Eren Tal dragged a stout wooden step-bench under the wall bracket. Then he climbed up beside Corvin Hest to inspect the eight-sided clay token and the iron chain-hoist above it. From the main hook of the overhead pulley hung a four-hundred-pound cast-iron fine-tuning weight, suspended six inches off the flat stone slabs with its safety pawl deliberately wired back by the foundry artificers.
“Look at how the foundry crew tricked the hoist token into staying active twenty-four hours a day,” Eren Tal said in disgust. He pointed his calloused thumb at the wired-back iron pawl and the suspended four-hundred-pound block. “They lifted a dead iron weight six inches off the floor and tied the ratchet open so the weight can never rest on the stone!”
