The freezing mountain gale tearing across Tier Three seemed determined to strip the flesh from Tomas Reed’s fingers.
Tomas knelt on the narrow granite coping stone directly above the center-line of Pier Six, his cowhide boots braced against an iron clamp-bollard that had held high-sky safety lines a century ago. The height was dizzying. One hundred and sixty-two feet of upright, sheer drop through black, howling space to the boiling white foam of the Eleanor River below. His left wrist brace throbbed with the steady, familiar ache of cold gristle. But he kept his attention locked on the brass rig resting between his knees.
Beside him, Nessa Vale was assembling the deep-drop plumb station. An ordinary land-mapper’s plumb-bob suspended on hemp twine was fully useless. The crosswinds boiling out of the gorge would bow a hemp line into a thirty-foot arc, rendering any measurement an exercise in fantasy.
To measure a two-hundred-foot stone arcade, the ancient builders had used piano-gauge hardened steel music wire, weighted with a thirty-pound turned bronze metal tube shaped like a teardrop to minimize wind-cutting drag, damped at the base inside a portable wooden tub of heavy stone oil.
“Wire anchored,” Nessa called out, her mouth pressed against Tomas’s ear to overcome the scream of the wind.
