The opening chiseled through the washhouse larder wall was scarcely three feet high and two feet wide, framed by crumbling red river bricks and the splintered oak leftovers of Hal Rook’s old check hatch. Beyond the breach, the darkness of the underground gallery was total, choked with a roaring, churning white plume of high-pressure steam escaping from the fractured baked-clay main forty feet down the channel. The heat billowing out of the hole felt like standing before the open fire-box of a heavy-duty locomotive. A choking, stone-heavy blast that instantly fogged Pella’s glasses and coated the back kitchen ceiling beams in thick, oily beads of rotten-egg water drops.
Eren Tal knelt before the jagged opening, checking the chin-strap of his protective headgear. Dima Fen had stitched a hooded cowl of bias-cut marsh reed that integrated seamlessly with the smock’s high, padded collar. That left only a narrow three-inch eye-slit shielded by a double layer of oiled silk gauze. Over his bandaged left arm, the reed sleeve hung roomy and loose, the diamond underarm gusset settling smoothly into his armpit without binding. In his right hand he carried an iron pry-bar and Hal Rook’s twenty-four-inch brass check measuring tongs. At his waist, a heavy cow-horn whistle was secured by a braided flax lanyard.
‘Remember the signals, Eren,’ Pella said, her hand resting on the dry reed shoulder of his coat. In her left grip, she held the brass stop bell connected to a forty-foot braided hemp safety line knotted securely around his chest harness. ‘One tug means you have reached the first brick pier. Two tugs means you’re taking a measuring tongs measurement. Three tugs means emergency extraction, and Tavi and I pull you back with the crank winch. If you feel heat biting through that reed, don’t argue with it. Slide backward into the draft right away.’
Eren’s muffled voice rumbled through the oiled silk gauze. ‘I didn’t spend twenty years building wagons to get boiled like a turnip, Pella. Keep the line slack so it doesn’t snag on the broken stonework.’ With a deep breath, he dropped to his belly, slid his broad shoulders through the jagged opening. Then he crawled into the roaring dark.
The heat struck him the moment his hips cleared the brick doorstep. Inside the confined barrel vault of the gallery, the surrounding heat was fifty-four degrees. It was hot enough to sear human lungs within minutes of unshielded exposure. The air was ninety-eight percent soaked with boiling stone vapor, so thick that his hardened carbon-iron lamp sputtered, choked on the moisture, and died within ten feet. But Eren didn’t need the lamp. The hairline fissure running along the belly of the four-foot baked-clay pipe was glowing with an eerie, turquoise soft glow. The trapped, agitated spiritual friction of the river spirit Senn leaking through the fractured glaze.
He crawled forward on his hands and knees through three inches of hot, gray stone sludge. The floor of the channel was coated in a scalding slurry of dissolved mortar and skin-burning river lime, but through the double-layered reed canvas on his knees and forearms, Eren felt only a dry, comfortable warmth, like a heated river stone wrapped in flannel. The bias-cut panels moved with his crawling stride effortlessly, the diamond gussets expanding without pinching his back or dragging the hem forward.
Twenty-five feet down the gallery, he met the main load-bearing bottleneck. An ancient foundation pier had settled two inches into the riverbed. It crushed the brick vault downward until the overhead clearance was scarcely twenty-two inches. Directly beside this constriction, a jagged three-foot crack in the baked-clay main was discharging a nonstop, screaming jet of white-hot salt water steam under forty-two pounds of pressure. The scalding plume struck Eren squarely across his chest and left shoulder, exploding in a blinding fury of hissing white droplets.
Eren braced his boots against the slippery brick floor, tensing his muscles in gut terror, waiting for the painful white-hot agony that had cooked his left arm that morning. But the agony never arrived.
The boiling stone vapor struck the dry reed smock. Then, the natural chemistry of the saltings activated. The cured plant fiber fibers, soaked with quartz dust and softened by Dima’s bitter-salt soda bath, greedily absorbed the hot moisture. Within four seconds, the woven reed ribbons swelled by forty-two percent in volume. Their tiny cell walls plumped and locked together, transforming the porous fabric into an iron-hard, glassy barrier as hard as turtle shell. The boiling droplets didn’t penetrate. They shattered against the curved chest-piece like rain against a slate roof, streaming harmlessly downward into the floor gutter.
Behind his shoulders, the shingled exhaust vents functioned with clean, steady care. Eren’s body heated from the physical labor of crawling. Then, the pocket of warm air inside the suit swelled. He lifted the downward-facing reed shingles half an inch. The body heat vented upward into the channel’s exhaust draft. Meanwhile, the overlapping shape prevented a single drop of high-pressure salt water from entering the suit from above. Inside the smock, the air around Eren’s chest remained at a steady, comfortable twenty-six degrees.
Eren reached through the screaming steam jet. He extended Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs into the narrow gap behind the baked-clay collar joint. The tips of the metal jaws contacted the bronze pipe rim with a clean, sharp clink. He adjusted the brass thumb-screw. He locked the measurement. Then he pulled the tool back against his chest under the turquoise soft glow of the pipe. He reached for the hemp safety line, giving it two sharp, distinct tugs that echoed back down the line to the washhouse.
Back in the back kitchen, Pella felt the two sharp pulses on the line. She let out a long breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, turned to her slate. Then she logged the confirmation: Worker reached Header 3. Two tugs recorded. Tracking data stable. Beside her, Dima Fen held his hands to his temples, muttering prayers to the River God. Meanwhile, Tavi tended the slack rope with wide, unblinking eyes.
In the gallery, Eren didn’t stop at the measurement. He wedged his iron pry-bar beneath a fallen chunk of ceiling stonework that was blocking the lower drainage cry-hole, levering the two-hundred-pound block into the sludge with a grunt of hard effort. The trapped salt water right away roared down the drain. It lowered the water level in the crawlway by four inches. He then pulled a seasoned spruce wedge from his belt, hammered it firmly beneath the sagging brick header to arrest further settling. Then he inspected the hairline crack along the baked-clay main with his fingers. The crack was clean, unbranched, and entirely repairable with lead wool and ash-lime mortar.
After thirty-five nonstop minutes in the heart of the boiling breach, Eren gave the hemp line three slow, steady tugs and began crawling backward along the tunnel floor. His boots and hips emerged into the back kitchen. Then, Pella and Dima rushed forward, seizing his harness and easing him out onto the clean flat stone slabs. Dima quickly unbuckled the reed cowl, lifting it from Eren’s head with trembling hands.
Eren’s face was red and dripping with honest sweat, his beard damp and his dark hair plastered to his skull. But his skin was fully flawless. There was not a single scald, not a blister, not a red welt anywhere on his neck or chest. He pulled his right arm from the sleeve. Then, his linen undershirt was damp with sweat, but fully dry of boiling river salt water.
Dima Fen reached out, his fingers stroking the outer reed surface of the smock. The marsh reed was slick, hard, and cool to the touch. Its woven scales were locked into an impermeable shield that shed water like an otter’s pelt. ‘It worked,’ the old tailor whispered, tears of skilled triumph spilling over his eyelashes. ‘By the Great Sluice... Forty-two pounds of boiling salt water, and the boy didn’t even singe an eyebrow!’
Eren sat back against the scrubbed bread table, took a deep, greedy gulp of cold well-water from Sister Merrow’s ladle. Then it held up the brass measuring tongs. ‘Four tiny fractions of an inch of bending on the collar joint, Pella. The sideways tearing force is packed on the bottom three bolts. We don’t have to rebuild the entire header. If we go in with ten timber shores and five bags of high-pressure lime, three men in these reed suits can repoint that entire collar in four hours.’ He looked at Dima, a fierce, victorious grin breaking across his bearded face. ‘Get your apprentices back to the benches, Master Fen. Lowbank is going into that pipe tomorrow, and we’re going to fix Sorell’s leak ourselves.’
Sister Merrow right away set a pot of hot chicory tea on the bench. She pushed a tin mug into Eren’s uninjured hand. Meanwhile, Pella inspected the reed fabric under the lantern light. The weave was still warm, emitting a rich, clean fragrance of cooked river vegetation and toasted cereal. The bias seams were tight, without a single thread pulled or broken. ‘Look at the back yoke, Pella,’ Eren said between swallows of tea. ‘When that forty-pound jet hit me, I could feel the steam pushing against the outside of the vents. But the shingles just sealed tighter. It’s an automatic valve, just like Jo said. She gave us an armor that breathes with a man’s lungs.’ Pella smiled, logging the tracking data into the Courtesy Bridge slate. The test was conclusive: Lowbank held the building key to its own salvation.