At two in the morning, the heavy silence of the cooperage was shattered by the wild drumming of iron horseshoes on the wet cobblestones outside. The door burst open, admitting a blast of freezing rain and an exhausted town courier.
It was Sergeant Brand of the Highland Post, his oilskin cloak plastered to his leather cuirass with freezing slush. His horse steaming and shook in the rain outside. He collapsed onto an inverted salt cask, his face blue with cold, thrusting a sealed tin dispatch tube into Inspector Korr Var’s hands.
‘The snowpack broke three hours ago in the High Tor,’ Sergeant Brand gasped, his breath coming in ragged white clouds. ‘An unseasonable warm front came over the western peaks. Four inches of warm rain fell on twelve feet of winter snow. The upper pool is already overflowing the emergency sills. The whole Gray Rush is coming down the gorge in a solid wall of yellow mud!’
Korr Var broke the seal, unrolling the soaked telegraph parchment under the lantern light. The numbers were terrifying. The river was rising at forty thousand cubic feet per second. It traveled eighteen miles an hour down the narrow mountain water chutes.
‘The crest isn’t arriving on Day Twenty-Seven,’ Korr Var said. He looked up with eyes that had gone hollow with shock. ‘The crest will hit the city on Day Twenty-Five. We don’t have six days, Pella. We have forty-eight hours.’
