To establish the legal admissibility of the shear data before the Supreme Court of King’s Bench, the court rules needed more than sight tracking data from a distance. Under the Civil Evidence City law of Year Three Hundred and Four, total collapse petitions needed physical dial-gauge measurements taken directly across the fracture plane.
That meant Tomas and Nessa had to go down outside the Spire’s western stone railing, hanging in mid-air four hundred feet above Weaver’s Row, to bolt clockwork shifted weight gauges across the three-hundred-and-eighty-foot bed joint.
Sile Rook knelt on the frost-covered granite flags of the Four-Hundred-Foot Gallery. He ran his thick, scarred palms down the length of the three-inch four-strand manila hawsers. His fingers, blackened by thirty years of handling tarred hemp and weapons, paused every six inches to examine the twist of the yarn.
“The outriggers are sound heart-oak catheads,” Sile said. He nodded toward two massive timbers bolted through the belfry low roof wall with forged iron tie-plates. “Twelve-inch square white oak, anchored back into the core chimney with two-inch draw-bolts. They could bear a four-ton naval gun without groaning.”
To test the anchoring timbers, Sile took a twelve-pound iron sledgehammer from the tool hamper and struck the iron tie-plates three heavy, measured blows. The sound that rang back through the stone was solid, deep, and ringing. The sound of well-seasoned mountain oak seated true against granite cut stone. There was no hollow rattle, no dry flaking of lime, no give in the iron washers…
