The descent from the toll booth into the substructure of the Great Timber Footbridge began through a trapdoor set into the floorboards behind the watchman’s coal locker.
Bram Ash remained in the toll shelter, his heavy frame wedged against the door, his hand resting on the iron bar. He held Pell’s check slip ready in his belt, his ears tuned to the heavy, rhythmic stamping of the bridge guards fifteen paces above on the main deck. Through the floorboards, the muffled rumble of loaded coal carts rattled the rafters with every crossing, showering flakes of dry creosote onto their shoulders.
Len followed Ivara through the trapdoor, his boots finding the narrow, creosoted rungs of an iron upkeep ladder that dropped into the freezing deep pit beneath the bridge.
The shift from the sheltered stillness of the toll booth to the raw, roaring violence of the river gorge was instant. Fifty paces downstream, the Black River plunged over the timber crests of the eight weir water gates. That set off an ear-splitting, nonstop thunder that echoed off the granite gorge walls and shook through the iron tie-rods of the bridge superstructure. The air was soaked with freezing sulfur spray, fine as atomized grease, that coated Len’s face in seconds. Then it turned his wool collar into a stiff, sodden weight.
