The workshop table had been reinforced with three thick baulks of seasoned ash to bear the weight before the first slab of hill-slate was carried through the door.
Edren Dene set his iron rasp down upon the bench with a dull clink, coughing twice into the crook of his flannel sleeve before reaching for the oil-can. The lung-rot he had brought up from the Crown silver galleries thirty years ago still caught him when the air grew cold, but his hands were as steady as an old surveyor’s plumb line.
“You have too much crown in the arch of the foot, Noll,” Edren said, running his calloused thumb along the underside of the left slate sole. “A mortal man walks on a spring of bone and sinew. If you carve a stone foot with an arch like a gentleman’s dancing slipper, the first time you step down a flight of wet stairs, the heel will take all three hundredweight and snap off at the peg.”
From his wall fissure above the bench, Noll directed a faint pulse of Bastion craft through the soft mortar, softening the slate just enough for Edren’s chisel to bite without throwing sparks.
“Make it flat, then,” Noll said. “A carter’s foot. Something that looks like it spent forty years standing on cold wharf timbers waiting for the tide.”
