At five hundred and fifty feet above Crown-Reach, upon the narrow, frost-crusted marble belfry platform directly beneath the overhanging bronze crown, thirty master shipyard riggers moved with the practiced, silent choreography of men who stepped masts on eighty-gun warships.
Led by Master Rigger Kael, the men had hauled four seventy-foot Oregon pine spars up through the core chimney using internal steam whip-lines. Each spar was fourteen inches square, seasoned heartwood straight as a lance, banded with forged iron hoops every six feet to resist crushing buckling.
Tomas Reed stood at the center of the staging platform, his braced left arm strapped firmly across his chest. His right hand held the master rigging blueprints. The wind at this height was blowing a steady thirty knots from the northwest. It carried the bitter, ozone-heavy chill of incoming storm clouds.
“Step the heel-pins!” Kael’s weathered voice cut through the wind like a foghorn.
Four heavy riggers with iron crowbars guided the butt of the first seventy-foot timber into a cast-iron socket shoe bolted through the granite belfry pier with two-inch draw-pins. With a heavy, ringing thud, the oak spar seated home: CHUNK.
Four pairs of sheer-legs were erected—two on the eastern side and two on the west—forming a huge timber derrick that straddled the entire thirty-foot bronze dome like a huge wooden cage.
