Len Vey knelt on the wet cobblestones beside the weir platform, his brass sounding pole braced against the ground, his braced left arm tucked securely within its hemp sling. With his uninjured right hand, he picked up a small iron check trowel from Urel’s toolkit and scraped a sample of the residue left behind by the double into a tin sample cup.
The material was cold. Colder than the surrounding river stones that had been bathed in sulfur steam for the past hour. Len rubbed a pinch of the gray granules between his thumb and index finger. Then, it didn’t grease his skin like coal sludge, nor did it smudge like soft charcoal. It had the dry, gritty texture of fiery ash mixed with crushed heat-proof glass, fully empty of organic oil, moisture, or cellular holding power.
He held the sample cup under the focused beam of his grease lantern, tilting it to inspect the fine dust structure. Tiny, thread-like filaments of rusted copper wire were intermingled with the stone dust, curled like burnt horsehair. These had been the spark channels of the creature’s man-made nervous system. The guide-rod lines that carried the four-hundred-volt static charge needed to hold the crushed dark rock together. Now that the River Claimant Cabinet was disconnected and its spindle shattered, the wire was as dead as old fencing pulled from a ditch.
