Frost had rimed the gray dock timbers along the Lowbank turning basin by five in the morning, crusting the mud with brittle salt-white needles that cracked under Pella Rook’s cart driver boots. The river ran thick and leaden beneath the lower wooden support posts. He carried the dead chill of mountain melt and the bitter reek of decaying willow rot from the flooded marshes two miles upstream.
Inside the disused under-road drain vault beneath the abandoned ferry slip, the air was warmer. Even so, it smelled worse. It carried the damp, bitter-salt stink of weeping limestone mortar, stale grease from old rope winch gearing. The sour sulfur drift that seeped continuously through the southern drainage trunks.
Pella set her timber tool crate onto a dry willow board. Her knuckles were stiff from the walk down the steep cobbles, her woolen mittens damp at the thumbs where she had cleared river silt from the padlock latch. She pulled off the mittens, tucked them into the waistband of her canvas apron. Then she blew onto her red palms.
“The tide mark hasn’t dropped since midnight,” Eren Tal said from the arched opening. He had a heavy ash pry-bar resting across his shoulder, his woolen smock powdered with fresh pine sawdust from the wheelwright yard. “High Tor runoff is backing up against the Gray Rush confluence. If Sorell clamps the central water gate another notch to keep the upper gardens dry, this floor will be under six inches of brown water by noon.”
