The shaking in the ash shaft was dull, grinding, and fractured.
Len stood on the lower limestone footing, his boots wedged against the slimy mortar joints where the foundation wall met the intake sump. His left arm hung bound against his ribs, locked still from knuckle to elbow in coarse linen wraps that smelled of boiled willow water, sheep fat, and dried blood. Every small twitch of his shoulder sent a hot, sickening throb through the eight horsehair stitches closing the muscle puncture in his forearm. To compensate, he had braced the ash-wood sounding pole through the modified iron forearm bracket he and Ivara had rigged before third bell. The padded collar passed the tool’s weight directly to his right shoulder. That left his sound right fingers free to clamp the brass guide sleeve.
He lowered the bronze tip of the pole down through the black surface of the water. That let the weighted probe drop into the flooded casing of the lower lift pump.
Four feet below the scum line, the probe struck shaking cast iron.
Len closed his eyes. He drew the damp underground air into his lungs in the slow, steady pace of his Long Breath baseline. The smell down here was thick and sour. Stale coal soot, decomposing river moss, and the rotten-egg rot of wet heavy-duty settled mud that had settled in the sump over twelve years of unbroken gloom.
