Inside the steaming cave of the Sluice Crown, suspended forty feet above the churning tailrace, Pella Rook leaned over the iron narrow high walkway railing, her eyes fixed on the heart of the bronze lattice. The heat was choking, thirty-five degrees above the cold river mist outside, tasting of scalded copper and bitter stone soda.
The river spirit Senn didn’t look like an angel, a demon, or an abstract elemental engine. It was a huge, branching current of glowing, cobalt-blue water that coiled and thrashed within the tube-shaped bronze cage. As the high-pressure water roared through the intake water chutes, tiny, fleeting images coalesced and dissolved within the swirling soft glow. The curve of an ancient riverbank fringed with weeping willows, a drowned Romanesque stone pier from a forgotten bridge, the flash of silver trout scales in a deep pool. The dark gravel bed of the Gray Rush before mortal hands ever quarried its stone.
‘It’s losing its memory,’ Korr Var shouted into Pella’s ear over the ear-splitting roar of the water chutes. ‘When an elemental spirit is subjected to clockwork bubbling blast, the astral matrix breaks down into isolated fragments. The spirit forgets its name, forgets the shape of its banks, and dissolves into raw moving fury. That is why Sorell’s control levers are kicking. He is not steering a horse. He is whipping a dying whale in a copper tank.’
