Jori put the first new pipe on the street and asked the residents to walk around it before anyone dug.
It was the morning of day 1222. The proposed return would leave the north gallery, pass along the outer quarry wall and reach the cooling yard without crossing beneath the houses. On the drawing the route looked obvious. On the street its first section lay across the place where a woman parked her bread cart, beside the handrail an elderly resident used to reach the upper rooms.
“Your drawing has taken my rail,” he said.
Jori knelt beside him and moved the chalk line outward. “Then the drawing needs to give it back.”
That shift cost two longer bends and a little more pipe. The forge had enough stock. The bread seller could move her cart to the wide part of the court during construction if the town paid a porter to bring it up the slope each morning. Lessa entered the porter in the work account instead of calling the woman’s lost earnings a contribution she had volunteered.
Neri was at Stonewake, working her own paid retaining-wall contract. She had not arrived at Ember Wash merely because the people here needed a designer. Jori had her own regional experience, Idri knew the live heating room and the residents knew how their street was used. They worked with the people actually standing beside the chalk.
