The oil-vault smelled of cold animal fat, lampblack, and sheep fat, but to Tomas Reed, it was the only room in the entire two-hundred-foot monolith that didn’t smell of office deceit.
He sat on an upturned barrel of pine tar beside the rough pine desk, his unlaced boots drying slowly by a small charcoal fire bowl. Beside his knee, the six young apprentices sat cross-legged on the damp flat stone slabs, their faces smudged with coal dust, each holding a wooden bowl of hot water steeped with dried mint and willow bark that Sile Rook had brewed over the coals.
Old Corin stood at the desk. His gnarled thumbs held down the curled corners of his oilcloth-bound notebook.
“Here,” Corin rasped, pointing a blackened fingernail at an entry dated nine years back. “The tenth day of the frost moon. Water gate Twelve. That was the winter the third winch drum cracked its spoke.”
Tomas leaned forward, the brim of his wool cap dripping water into his lap. “Read it, Corin.”
“I don’t need to read it,” the old man said, his voice flat with fifty years of remembered grease. “I know the numbers in my shoulder joints. The winch drum was cast bronze, four feet across, geared sixty-to-one to the central worm shaft. The royal foundry in the capital cast it with a sand-pocket near the hub. A void three inches wide, filled with melted rock waste and air. We told Chief Engineer Kael the drum wouldn’t take the winter…
