Ivara Quill held her iron sounding rod horizontally across the narrow drainage channel, blocking Len’s advance with the cold metal shaft.
“Hold,” she breathed.
The column halted instantly. Behind them, the twelve workers stood pressed against the slimy dark rock stonework of the drainage gallery, their boots underwater to the ankles in black, lukewarm overflow water that carried an oily rainbow sheen across its surface.
Ivara leaned her ear against the cast-iron casing of a twelve-inch drainage bypass that dropped through the ceiling vault. The metal was shaking at a high, rhythmic pitch. The clear whine of a backup water turbine spinning at twelve hundred turns a minute. Through the iron wall of the pipe, she heard the distinct, hollow clank of an iron shovel scraping across a coal bunker two floors above. She was followed by a muffled curse from a boiler-tender.
“The backup pumps are still drawing from the River reserve,” Ivara said. She turned her head toward Len. Her face was lit up only by the faint, diffused green glow of a copper-wire safety lamp Urel held sheltered beneath his leather coat. “Morn hasn’t realized the River anchor is dead. He thinks the pressure drop in the intake chimney pipes is an ordinary silt blockage.”
