In the vaulted undercroft beneath the High Terrace Sluice Crown, the heat was choking. Steam hissed from eight threaded brass check ports, condensing on the cold ceiling granite and raining down in hot, stone-heavy droplets that tasted of sulphur and crushed river limestone.
Foreman Vane stood upon an iron narrow high walkway thirty feet above the roaring intake water chutes. He held a lantern whose glass was filmed with grease. Four academy masons in heavy leather jerkins were tightening the turnbuckles on a four-inch bronze bypass line that had not carried water in thirty-five years. Each turn of their heavy iron wrenches produced a shrill, metal shriek that echoed off the damp wet stonework walls.
“Set the scrapers to the pipe rim faces before you tighten that seating seal ring!” Vane shouted over the ear-splitting rush of the captured river below. Thick crusts of copper green rust flaked off the old valve housing. It fell like greenish snow into the dark current below. “If that joint leaks under forty pounds of head, the scald will strip the meat from your ribs before you reach the ladder!”
A young mason wiped his forehead with a sleeve smeared with white pipe lime. “Foreman! The posture collar is warped two tenths of an inch. Hal Rook’s old apprentices laid this pipe to breathe into the open marsh. If we bolt it tight to the high collector, the heat swelling will sheer the anchor bolts in the bedrock!”
