Hanging in mid-air four hundred feet above the cobblestones of Weaver’s Row, the physical reality of the Spire’s failure was no longer an abstraction of shape. It was a sense onslaught of grinding stone and howling wind.
Tomas Reed’s bosun chair swayed gently on its four-strand bridle as a forty-knot gust swept around the western flank of the eight-sided shaft. He planted both boot heels against the marble cut stone, flexing his knees to absorb the back-and-forth swing. Directly in front of his face, level with his chest harness, ran the three-hundred-and-eighty-foot bed joint.
It wasn’t a joint. It was an open wound across the body of the tower.
The upper tier of white marble blocks had slipped fourteen point three two inches westward over the lower granite tier. The overhanging lip formed a jagged, fractured shelf that cast a sharp shadow across the receding stone below. Along the entire twenty-foot level screen, the original lime mortar had been crushed into a fine, chalky flour by decades of cyclic friction.
Every time a major gust slammed into the northern belfry above, a deep, bone-jarring shaking traveled down the stonework. The upper marble block shifted westward with a faint, sickening scrape—shhh-tuck—squeezing out a fresh puff of white stone powder that was instantly snatched away by the gale.
