By midday, the cold river mist had burned off into a thin, yellow autumn haze. That left the Great Sky-Spire exposed against the pale northern sky.
Seen from the cobbles of Weaver’s Row, the tower appeared perfectly straight. A huge pillar of fluted white marble and squared granite cut stone soaring above the lower wards. Yet when Tomas Reed knelt beside Master Dyer Kael’s vat-shed. He laid his palm against the cold granite curb, he felt what the eye couldn’t see: a rhythmic thrumming pulsing through the bedrock every four to five seconds.
It wasn’t the rumble of wagons on the High Bridge or the river tide against the wharves. It was the deep, elastic shaking of six hundred feet of stonework swaying in the upper gale, flexing like a green willow branch under winds that never touched the street.
“Three inches deep into the bedding gravel,” Nessa Vale said, crouching five yards away.
She had laid her four-foot jointed boxwood survey rod across the crater where the limestone block had struck the street cobbles before bounding into the dye shed. The heavy solid mountain stone were shattered into wedge-shaped splinters driven deep into the yellow gravel bedding.
“The paver took six thousand foot-pounds of striking force,” Nessa continued, her pencil scratching in her oilcloth ledger. “Assuming standard end-post descent, that block dropped from at least four hundred and eighty feet. Not the lower gallery or the frieze at two hundred. It came from the upper lantern collar, Tomas. Right…
