At seven bells on the twenty-fifth evening, the alley door of Sister Merrow’s washroom swung open and Master Tailor Dima Fen stepped inside with two of his journeyman weavers. She carried a twenty-foot metal tube of heavy, wool-grease-waxed marsh-reed canvas slung across their shoulders like a rolled mainsail. The forty-six-year-old tailor’s wool waistcoat was speckled with white chalk and dried sheep fat. His fingers were stained red-brown from painting the ochre warning stripes along the box-pleat arrestor bands. But his step was brisk with craftsman’s pride.
“Clear the pine table, Pella Rook, and bring your father’s brass measuring tongs!” Dima Fen announced, heaving the sixty-pound canvas channel onto the scrubbed boards with a solid thump. “Sleeve Number Four is stitched, waxed, grommeted with sixteen-gauge brass collars at both mouths, and ready for your ledger before we carry it down to the Turning Basin shed.”
Pella, Foreman Eren Tal, and Examiner Corvin Hest gathered around the long table under the animal fat lamps as Dima unrolled the center six feet of the channel to expose the offering relief window.
Even without Jo Saye physically present in the room, every inch of the garment bore the clear signed name of the two master tailors’ collaboration across worlds. Along the main load-bearing body of the tube, Dima’s weavers had laid two orthogonal plies of split winter Gray Rush reed-cloth quilted with raw wool-grease—a fabric tough enough to contain ninety pounds of scalding, grit-laden stone water without weeping a drop.
