At three bells on the seventh afternoon. Meanwhile, the red thread still stretched taut across the Fourth Ward plat on Sister Merrow’s bread table, Pella Rook and Foreman Eren Tal added an upright high-pressure profile strip along the lower border of the linen sheet.
To convince Senior Auditor Varo Nenn and the skeptical clerks of the Drainage Commission beyond any procedural cavil, it wasn’t enough to show that the twelve cellars lay in a straight line on a plan view.
They also had to prove that the water inside those twelve cellars belonged to a single high-pressure flow dropping from the Eastern Terrace rather than tidal backwash pushing up from the harbor.
Old Hob, the seventy-year-old retired ferry waterman from the Nine Lanterns courtyard, arrived at the back kitchen door carrying a canvas roll of pre-flood sounding books and the heavy brass-weighted lead line he had used when working alongside Hal Rook sixteen winters earlier.
“Your father and I walked the inside of Culvert Four-B with grease torches the autumn before the big water,” Old Hob said. He laid his weathered palm respectfully near the corner of the linen map and squinting through the gray window light. “Hal always told the young masons that an underground pipe has two signed names you can’t counterfeit: its friction slope and its pulse rate. Have you timed the beat at the kitchen wall against the cellars up the lane?”
