Before the wire team began hauling the eighty-pound coils of padded copper up into the museum gallery, Imran Bell insisted on a three-minute test pause at the base of Foundation Pier Four.
Imran didn’t carry the emotional baggage of Lathmere’s history. He didn’t care about the ancient rivalry between academy summoners and lowbank wagon drivers, and he didn’t view the river as a mythical dragon to be appeased with poetry. To Imran, a foundation was a physical structure governed by material properties. The unexplained behavior of living organisms was simply raw data waiting for an honest hypothesis.
He knelt on a damp burlap sack beside the massive, four-foot-square granite pier that supported the southern arch of the academy terrace. The stone block was rough-hewn, dressed with a tooth-chisel sixty years ago. Then it bedded in dark river mortar. Around the base of the pier, a six-inch collar of powdered limestone had collected like fine gray flour, shaken loose from the upper joints by the relentless underground shaking.
Pella touched the gray powder with the tip of her boot. “This mortar was solid when we inspected the kilns yesterday morning. It took forty-eight hours of shaking to pulverize three inches of bed-joint.”
