Councilor Elna Vesk stood up from the ash carpenter’s bench, her knees stiff from the cold damp, but her stance straight and commanding. She was no longer weeping. The high-born dignity that had governed her forty years on the town committees had returned, hardened now by the terrible clarity of what she had seen.
‘You have proven your theorem, Miss Rook,’ Elna said. Her voice carried clearly across the quiet market square. ‘You have showed beyond any legal or scientific doubt that Grand Master Sorell’s Sluice Crown will fracture the lower weirs if the third gate remains sealed. But now I must ask you the question that any responsible town elder must ask before she signs a decree.’
She stepped to the edge of the shattered cedar rig. She pointed her cane toward the southern horizon where the dense chimneys and slate roofs of Lowbank stretched toward the river mouth. ‘Where does the vented water go?’
The crowd held its collective breath. The guildmasters looked at one another with uneasy glances. This was the core of the political hard choice that had numbed the Works Board for a decade.
‘In eighteen hundred and thirty-eight,’ Elna continued, ‘when your father built the Great Sluice, the land south of Fish Street was open reed marsh and tidal mudflats. The third gate vented its surplus head. Then, the water discharged harmlessly into four hundred acres of salt grass where nobody lived except snipe and wild geese.’
