At noon on the twenty-second day, Korr Var and Pella stood on the muddy levee overlooking the old Ferry Turning Basin at the eastern edge of Lowbank. The rain had settled into a steady, gray drizzle, but the wind off the river was rising. It carried the bitter cold of the approaching mountain crest.
The turning basin was a huge oval pool four hundred yards long and nearly two hundred yards wide, built forty years ago as a sheltered haven for river barges during the autumn gales. For thirty years, following the relocation of the main commercial docks to the High Terrace, the basin had been abandoned to the river, silting up with four feet of yellow clay, rotting marsh reeds, and heavy-duty debris.
‘Here is the city’s second lung, Pella,’ Korr Var said. She swept his wooden rule across the dismal, weed-choked expanse. ‘If we excavate four feet of silt from this floor and reopen the old stonework spillway on the south bank, this basin can swallow one hundred and forty thousand cubic yards of river surge in twenty minutes.’
‘That is roughly twelve thousand cubic feet per second,’ Pella calculated rapidly, her pencil moving across her notebook. ‘The exact volume that Sorell’s blocked quarry bypass was supposed to carry. If we vent the Sluice Crown into this basin, the water spreads across forty acres of flood meadow, bleeding its energy harmlessly into the lower marsh instead of hammering against the Fish Street cellars.’
