Pella Rook stepped forward to the bar. She didn’t raise her voice. She spoke with the cold, steady pace of an apprentice reading a hair-width dial on a workshop floor.
‘Master Sorell offers you a very comfortable story, Councilman,’ Pella said, looking directly at Vesk. ‘He tells you that an ancient silt dam conveniently formed in less than ten seconds at the exact moment he engaged his backup choke on the High Terrace. But hydraulics doesn’t believe in convenient coincidences.’
She pulled Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs from her belt and tapped the snapped face of the iron gudgeon. ‘The speed of a high-pressure blast wave through water-filled stone under-road drains is roughly four thousand feet per second. The distance from the High Terrace Crown to Miller Tom’s mill is one mile and a quarter. The time elapsed between Sorell’s recorded gate closure and the mill collapse was exactly one hundred and twenty-eight seconds. That is not a silt dam, Councilman. That is a direct clockwork blast wave traveling down an unvented pipe.’
She turned to the academy benches, holding up the stolen heat ledger. ‘And water doesn’t boil at twenty degrees unless it’s subjected to bubbling blast. The forty-four degrees recorded in this ledger is not divine transmutation. It’s friction and steam generated by an elemental spirit thrashing against bronze bars. You can’t flatter water with Latin hymns, Master Sorell, and you can’t stop forty thousand tons of water-pressure head with a golden blueprint. When the water rises, only…
