Brannoc felt the water go through the Hold as a rope feels a weight when the man on the far end leans back. It went from the well up the cart-track, through the posterngate and the gate’s own bar and the stone of the wall-foot, and along the parapet to the stair where the buckets were, and every stretch of it pulled at him. He was the one who had to keep it moving. That was what a gatewarden was for. A gate held nothing back for long if the water behind it had stopped.
He was in the gate’s bar and the posterngate’s sluice and the cistern pipes all at once, and he said so, out loud, to the Watch at the stair-head, who could not hear him and did not need to. The water was short. The cistern stood at two-thirds that morning, and by the middle of the afternoon it had gone to a third, and Brannoc could feel the level sinking under his hand as a man feels his own blood going out of a cut. A bucket line on a burning wall could not keep a stone wet if the buckets were running dry. The buckets came up from the well full, and went along the parapet full, and came back down empty, and every empty bucket was a little less water that the Hold would have for its goats and its children and its Kitchen.
