The descent from the Upper Terraces to Lowbank was marked by six hundred and forty granite steps, each worn into a shallow, water-holding trough by two hundred years of river porters. At the top of the stair, the air was scented with chimney juniper, refined wax, and the dry mountain breeze off the High Tor. By the time Pella reached the three-hundredth step, the wind had died, replaced by the heavy, bitter-salt smell of wet lime mortar, boiling cabbage, and the stale, iron-gray stench of the river flats.
Lowbank was not a district designed by master builders. It was a slow buildup of silt, timber, and stubbornness huddled beneath the massive granite retaining walls that held up the college and the senate halls above. Here. There, the Gray Rush split around the marsh islands before meeting the Silt Reach, two thousand families lived in leaning three-story brick apartments supported by crooked larch wooden support posts.
The high-water marks of the Great Flood fourteen years ago were still visible. A dark, oil-stained band of pitch and river weed burned into the brick four feet above the current street level. On every corner, copper overflow pipes from the upper city jutted from the retaining wall, vomiting soapy graywater and kitchen refuse directly into the open cobblestone gutters. Children in cut-down wool smocks chased geese through the mud, while washerwomen with arms red as boiled lobsters beat wet sheets against stone troughs fed by trickling under-road drains.
Pella walked along Fish Shambles Alley, her cedar chest resting against her hip. She didn’t look like a failed scholar. In her coarse hemp smock and heavy cowhide boots, she looked like any other Lowbank tradeswoman returning from an unpaid shift at the cart hauling yards. She knew every uneven flat stone slab on this street. She knew which cellar grates rattled when an empty heavy cart passed, and which brick walls cried saltpeter before a rainstorm.
At the corner of Cooper’s Ditch, the rhythmic, metal clatter of an anvil cut through the damp river fog.
CLANG. CLANG. TINK.
The yard behind the low timber fence smelled of charred charcoal, green ash wood, and rancid sheep fat. A massive iron rim, four feet in width and an inch thick, lay red-hot on a circular bed of glowing coke embers. Beside it stood Eren Tal, his leather smith’s apron scorched black at the waist, a pair of long-handled forging tongs clutched in his thick, soot-stained fists.
Eren was twenty-three, broad-shouldered as a draught horse, with hair cropped short with sheep shears and a blunt nose that had been broken twice by falling wagon poles. He was Pella’s oldest acquaintance. Their fathers had built the timber staging for the lower ferry together when both of them were still small enough to sleep in a nail keg.
Eren lifted the red-hot iron tire from the fire with the tongs, swung it with a grunt of shoulder muscle. Then he dropped it over the wooden felloes of an oak wagon wheel mounted on the truing platform.
TCHHHHHHHHH.
A blinding plume of white steam erupted as Eren inverted a bucket of cold river water over the smoking joint. The wood shrieked as the iron tightened, biting into the dry ash felloes with a sound like bone cracking.
“Hold the rim, Tavi!” Eren shouted through the steam.
A scrawny thirteen-year-old boy with coal-smudged cheeks lunged forward with a pair of iron pliers, pinning the cooling tire until the steam died to a thin, bitter wisp of scorched wood and wet charcoal.
Eren lowered his tongs, wiped his streaming brow with the back of a blackened forearm, and spit into the cool trough. Then his brown eyes landed on Pella standing by the gate with her cedar chest.
“Well,” Eren said, setting the tongs on the anvil with a dull clunk. “Look at the scholar. Home before sundown. Did Master Sorell give you a velvet hat, or did you drop your chalk in the soup?”
Pella walked through the gate, set her chest on a dry timber balk. Then she unbuttoned the throat of her smock. “I didn’t drop the chalk. A hot-water line blew out above the check desk.”
Eren stopped reaching for his water dipper. He looked at her left shoulder, noting the blistered skin visible beneath the torn wool. “The heating coil in the Vault of Seven Seals? The two-inch line with the brass union?”
Pella blinked. “You know that line?”
“I built the cedar cradle for the spreading tank three winters back,” Eren said. He took a long pull from the dipper and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Told their clerk the shaking from the lower steam pump would shear the solder within eighteen months. He told me college copper doesn’t shear because the Arch-Curator blessed the alloy. So it blew?”
“Right across Sorell’s thick parchment ledger,” Pella said. “I knocked the book onto the floor before the boiling water hit. He stripped my badge for stepping across the salt ring.”
Eren let out a short, dry bark of a laugh that had no humor in it. “Of course he did. Can’t have a girl from the docks proving that pipe scale obeys gravity instead of Latin verbs. What did he give you for saving sixty years of tax records?”
“Three hours in Relic Sub-Cellar 4 to pay for the spilled ink.”
Eren’s face darkened. He set the wooden dipper down on the cool trough with deliberate care. “Sub-Cellar 4? The flooded vault behind the old water gate? That place has been sealed since the winter the ferry went down. The stonework down there’s weeping sulfur salt water. Half the ceiling timbers are dry-rotted.”
“He wants the iron spirit cages hauled to the gravel ramp before midnight,” Pella said. She reached into her apron, pulled out Hal’s brass measuring tongs. Then she adjusted the thumb screw until the jaws clicked. “If I don’t clear it, the beadles will pick me up at the gate for vagrancy.”
Eren walked over to the timber balk, sat down heavily. Then he picked up a rasp to clean the burrs off the new wagon tire. “The beadles won’t come down to Lowbank tonight. They’re too busy watching the upper water gate.”
Pella frowned, stepping closer. “What’s wrong with the water gate?”
Eren gestured with the rasp toward the back of the yard, where Cooper’s Ditch flowed beneath a heavy timber under-road drain toward the river. “The cellar drains have been talking backward for three days. You know old Mother Vane who runs the laundry on Fish Street? Her sub-floor drain bubbled up yesterday afternoon. Wasn’t cold river water, either. It was warm, gray sludge that smelled of boiled sulphur and rotten shale. Took her four hours to shovel the muck out of her starch tubs.”
“Warm sludge?” Pella murmured. “The river thaw is barely four degrees above freezing.”
“It’s not the river,” Eren said, his voice dropping into a low, hard rumble. “It’s Sorell’s new toy. The Hollow Crown. They started testing the intake pumps behind the High Weir last Tuesday. Every time they fire those brass drain tubes up top, something down here groans like an old barge grounding on gravel. I had to re-wedge my shop wooden support posts this morning. That was because the clay beneath the doorstep settled an inch toward the water. If that foundation shifts another two inches, my roof truss will crack in half.”
Tavi, who had been listening with his mouth open while wiping the pliers with an oily rag, leaned forward. “Eren, the wagon drivers said the Crown has an undying sea beast locked inside it. They say it drinks the river water and spits out dry gold for the High Senators.”
“The wagon drivers are idiots who drink sour beer and repeat whatever the ballad-mongers sing,” Eren snapped. “Nothing drinks water without pushing it somewhere else. You put ten thousand tons of river through a narrow pipe, the weight has to go into the stone. And the stone under Lowbank is sixty feet of soft marsh clay sitting on rotten limestone.”
He turned back to Pella, his eyes narrowing against the setting sun. “You going down to that cellar alone?”
“I don’t have six silver coins to pay a cart driver,” Pella said. “And I don’t have an apprentice badge to show the watch.”
Eren stood up, untied his heavy leather apron, and tossed it over the anvil. “Tavi, rake the forge fire out and lock the tool shed. If anyone comes for the milk wagon, tell them the axle’s cooling and it’ll cost ten copper bits if they want it before dawn.”
“Eren,” Pella said, “you have three orders on the rack. The cart driver from the flour mill was shouting for his cart yesterday.”
“The flour cart can wait until morning,” Eren said. He reached behind the door for a six-foot ash pry-bar and an iron lantern filled with thick sheep fat. “Hal Rook pulled my father out of the gray water when the lower gate went. If you think I’m letting Hal Rook’s girl get crushed by a rusted spirit cage in a dark cellar so Davin Sorell can save ten pence of beadle wages, you’ve forgotten whose yard this is.”
He picked up a coil of four-ply hemp haulage rope, slung it over his broad shoulder. Then he kicked the yard gate open.
“Come on,” Eren muttered. “Let’s go look at what the college forgot to throw away.