In the cramped brick bay beneath the grating, the smell of grease, hot animal fat, and unwashed wool drifted down through the oak seams.
Fellis Dain knelt on his heels, his head tilted back until his throat was taut, his brown eyes examining the underside of the cast-iron frame with the cold, test scrutiny of an experienced rigger.
The grating was not simply laid into the floorboards like an iron trivet on a stove. In high-pressure pump houses, where a failing steam valve or a water-hammer could blow timber planks through the roof, iron floor grates were secured from below by heavy underside lugs that passed through mortised oak stringers.
Four split iron cotter pins, each four inches long and thick as a carpenter’s pencil, were driven horizontally through the cast lugs beneath the frame to lock the grating down against lifting from above or below.
Thirty years of salt air had coated the iron lugs in a thick, crystal-clear crust of red rust and white chalk-stone scale.
If someone shoved the grating upward with a crowbar or jerked at the bars without removing the pins, the rusted iron would screech against the oak wood slot with a sound like a sawmill blade striking a hidden spike. A metal shriek that would bring two cavalry sabers plunging through the floorboards in half a heartbeat.
