Perched on the wet granite coping of the western retaining wall, Ilyra looked down through two feet of churning, scalding stone water at the first pressure-relief dome. Thirty years of third-terrace stone runoff had crusted the cast-iron valve cap beneath a four-inch rind of rock-hard banded limestone lime. Every three beats the Mineral Spring Guardian’s left limestone forearm swept directly across that corner of the basin with enough Jade-scale weight to snap a pine tree in half.
Ten paces away behind the water-trough, Seyun watched the guardian’s massive stone shoulders rise for the first beat of the loop. His own Dual-Route Flame was too light to deflect the spirit’s arm if it caught Ilyra pinned in the thrust. But he knew the drainage hydraulics of this courtyard better than anyone alive. Seyun lifted his ash walking pole in his right hand and drawing a single copper needle between the fingers of his left. He hobbled three steps out from the trough along the raised stone curb that bordered the western water gate box.
“When the western arm drops, it drives a wave of hot silt back through this side water gate before the hitch!” Seyun called up to Ilyra, planting the iron-shod tip of his walking pole against the wooden water gate lever he had greased a hundred times as a fourteen-year-old chore boy. “Wait until I drop the side gate to clear the standing water over the cap—then take Joren’s count!”
