There is a great deal of difference between a trap built to make a spectator gasp from the benches and a test built by a woman who has actually carried wounded men out of a flooded cellar.
Noll Vey discovered that difference between noon and two o’clock, while his mortar seams ached from shifting flagstones and Sella Rusk stood in the center of the third chamber with a carpenter’s plumb-bob in one hand and her ash shield in the other.
“Raise the seventh stone half an inch on the eastern lip, Vey,” Sella said, tapping the heel of her boot against the broad grey slab Noll had just settled into the floor clay. “When a delver pivots left to cover the eighth station, his weight comes down on his outer heel. If that edge dips toward the drain groove, he turns his ankle before the bar ever reaches him. I’m training knees, not spraining them for Fen to wrap.”
“Half an inch on the eastern lip,” Noll muttered through the wall seam, drawing a ribbon of stiff lime mortar under the flagstone until Sella’s plumb-line hung dead center over the chalk mark. “You know, in Greyford, when we staged The Labyrinth of the Caliph, we simply painted the floor squares in yellow distemper and had a boy behind the curtain hit a sheet of thunder-tin whenever the hero stepped on the red one. Nobody brought a plumb-bob.”
