While the politicians argued on the High Terrace, Pella and Eren were high above the city. She stood on the lead-sheathed roof of St. Jude’s bell tower. The wind off the gorge was fierce, whipping rain into their faces and humming through the angled slats of the belfry like an organ pipe. Two hundred feet below, the gray roofs of Lowbank looked like rows of wet slates floating on a sea of mud. Meanwhile, the river churned through the bridges in a white, angry fury.
They were completing the work Hal Rook had planned fourteen years ago: the second warning bell line. For thirty years, Lowbank had relied on a single signal line that ran through the sewer tunnels. The very line that had snapped when the mill water chute burst. Hal’s proposal had been to string an overhead wire of glowing-bronze from the high church tower directly across the gorge to the timber gallows on the Third Gate bridge pillar.
Eren Tal leaned out over the low roof wall, his heavy leather harness buckled around the stone railing. He hauled on a three-fold tackle. The glowing-bronze wire, three-eighths of an inch thick and glistening with sheep fat, rose out of the mist from the far bridge pillar, singing with high-pulling tension as it cleared the river spray.
