The morning fog off the Lowbank mudflats smelled of dead bladderwrack, coal smoke from the animal fat chandler’s chimney. The sharp, sour tang of disturbed anaerobic silt. Along the outer embankment of the Lower Sluice—where the overflow channel from Cooperage Row dropped eight feet through a timber-lined race into the tidal gut—the frost of the last week had thawed into a forty-foot scar of sliding grey grease.
Pella Rook stood at the top of the embankment in her oiled canvas gaiters. She held a six-foot pine leveling staff upright against her boot heel. Meanwhile, Eren Tal sighted along the timber breastwall from the lower plank walk. Every time a heavy cart rumbled across the cobbles of Wharf Lane fifty yards behind them, a faint tremor traveled through the sodden clay bank, and another ribbon of melted mud sloughed off the toe of the slope into the brown water of the race.
“Three inches of outward belly in the middle king-pile since last Thursday,” Eren called up. He wiped a drop of cold fog moisture from the tip of his nose with the back of his wool-mitted hand. He tapped the tarred oak upright with the flat of his carpenter’s hatchet. “The timber’s sound enough, Pella. The iron tie-rods are holding onto the deadmen back under the lane. But the warm seep coming down from the deep drain is washing the fines right out from behind the planking. If the spring spate hits before this bank knits together, the river’s going…
