SALTSPINE — Smoke showed on the Keelhouse roof at 15:03. The ridge wind was 28 knots out of the northwest. The wetting cloud was two ridges west, on a poster pass, with the light already paid for.
The Keelhouse stands on the Saltspine crown, a name-day gift for High Warden Brant in the fourteenth year of the North Mark. Brant held the passes. The gift put a brass cage-lift through the rock, a nine-minute wheel from the switchback to the parlor. He rode it four times, left before the tea, and drank in the guard shed at the base. The Canterlot Council holds the lease. Lunch runs from 11:00. Tuesday's book had thirty-one covers against a room rated for forty.
Crown wetting was on the card at 14:10. Cloudworks No. 4 had the cell at 1.2 loads, enough for cedar and gutter. At 13:40 Director Windfall Margin sent the cell west of the col for a Wonderbolt call sheet. The late shift he left on the crown was two pegasi, one cistern, and an order not to pull against an exhibition cart.
Rook Sable, crew chief of that shift, read the change off the board. "Fourteen-ten was the wet. The cistern was on the cart by thirteen-fifty because the camera was. I can enter a fire. I cannot enter a missed sun."
The roof is cedar over stone. The Council's fire card lists the roof as stone. The cedar went on nine seasons ago at 62,000 bits so the lunch pictures would match the plaque. By 15:19 the west wall was open. Brant's portrait lay in the service alley, frame split, glass still in it.
The Wonderbolt press office filed at 15:11 and called the heat planned, the crown clear, heritage staff in charge. Gale Report, on the late desk, had marked an unplanned fire at 15:06 with nothing aloft. The office did not correct the line. At 15:40 it put control at six minutes.
The lift had no stop-key on the crown. The winding-shed key was with the Council clerk at the poster pass, where he had a tray of pins. The wheel held its mark and opened on the parlor at 15:12, 15:21, and 15:30 with cucumber sandwiches and a card that read "complimentary with the view." The 15:30 car brought a party of four who had been told the smoke was kitchen steam. They rode down at 15:39. One of them kept the card.
Plover Quinn took the reserve call at 15:17. She was the spare at the exhibition staging and was not on the poster. She flew forty gallons up on a torn left primary, logged before she left the ground, and made the crown at 15:36. "Forty gallons on cedar in a 28-knot wind is a damp patch. I took the fifteen-thirty tray off the linen because a dropped order is not replaced. Then I put the water on the gutter. The pamphlet had the word controlled. The gutter did not."
The forty gallons held the alley and did not hold the roof. Nell Harp, kitchen lead, took a scald off the urn and walked the service stair at 15:52. The base shed released her at 18:10. Quinn flew the second trip with the feather splinted. The log shows those two injuries. The thirty-one covers were down at 15:28. The party of four was still on the way up.
Margin spoke from the pass with the formation still in the air. "The exhibition was a scheduled asset. A heritage fire is a heritage matter. The cell was reallocated inside the hour it was asked for." Asked which hour, he said the photographer's.
The cloud left the poster pass at 16:22, after the last frame, and was on the crown at 16:41. Sable logged knockdown at 17:11 and containment at 17:19. Smoke to containment was 96 minutes. The bulletin stayed at six. A press clerk who would not sign the pamphlet said the six minutes ran from the decision to call it controlled.
The Canterlot Council posted four lines at 19:00, thanked the exhibition for yielding the sky, and kept Wednesday's lunch on the book at forty covers. The lines left out the wind and the gap. Canterlot Institute called it a heat event on original fabric. The switchback shop kept selling brass lifts at twelve bits.
Sable filled the cistern back to forty gallons at 21:05 with a hand pump. The exhibition cart still had the hose. Margin's slip at 21:30 classed the day a joint heritage and display operation and did not mention 15:03.
The brake card showed four trips after 15:03, the last of them leaving the parlor at 15:39. The crown's wetting allotment for the month, confirmed only when read back to Margin's clerk, was 900 bits. The poster pass was billed at 40,000.
