Reaching through a two-foot stone breach into a chamber where the air temperature stood well above a baker’s oven required leather, speed, and an absolute refusal to flinch.
Before Jon and Alden Bram leaned their shoulders into the opening, Garrick Holt soaked two pairs of heavy horsehide smith’s gauntlets in a bucket of tallow-water and strapped them over Jon’s and Bram’s wrists. The blacksmith himself knelt on the right side of the masonry aperture with an eighteen-inch tapered iron marlinspike in his fist and the turned ash spool of Object #2 mounted on an iron rod between his boots so he could control the payout drag with his leather apron.
“Remember the truss geometry before your hands go into the heat, Jon,” Alden Bram said, tapping his chalked diagram on the granite sill with a leather-gloved knuckle. “We don’t wrap round and round the rim like a girl winding a maypole—that would only pull the broken spokes inward and crush the hub. We anchor the standing end with a clove-hitch around the sound bronze spindle-shank behind the boss, bring the braid out over Spoke One into Garrick’s rim-notch, cross diagonally back under the split boss to Spoke Four, and pull every figure-eight to full marlinspike tension before we pass to the next pair.”
