Korr Var climbed to the top of the spoil heap, his boots slipping on the slick limestone gravel. From this vantage point, the true deep-rock horror of Sorell’s design became clearly clear.
The High Tor quarry sat on a fault plane of fractured pale limestone that sloped downward at an angle of forty degrees directly toward the Lowbank apartments. For thirty years, Hal Rook had forbidden any drainage works in this sector. That was because the porous limestone acted like an underground funnel.
‘Eren, bring the sounding bar!’ Korr Var called out, pointing with his staff to a dark fissure running along the cliff base. Eren hauled the twelve-foot iron bar through the mud and drove it into the fissure. The bar slid down eight feet without meeting solid bedrock, disappearing into an underground void that gurgled with cold, rushing water.
‘It connects directly to the lower karst system,’ Korr Var said. His face was pale against the dark sky. ‘If forty thousand tons of water were dumped into this basin, the water wouldn’t pool on the surface. It would pour straight down this fissure, follow the fault plane under crushing pressure, and emerge as an underground piston beneath Fish Street, blowing the entire lower district into the river from below.’
