The cobblestones beneath Pella’s boots gave a distinct, sickening lurch. A dull, sub-heard shiver that traveled through the wet stonework of the eastern retaining wall like an underground pulse. In the gutters of Fish Street, muddy water bubbled up between the stone joints in dozens of tiny geysers, hissing as it met the cool autumn air and releasing thick clouds of scalding stone steam.
The smell was choking. Ancient sewer settled mud, sharp pipe lime leaching from dissolved lime mortar. The rotten-egg stench of deep sulfur gas forced out of the underlying clay beds. Pella knelt in the slurry. She pressed her palms against the base of the twenty-foot limestone wall that separated the street from the high academy terrace above. The stone was uncomfortably hot to the touch, shaking with a rapid, sixteen-cycle back-and-forth swing.
‘The core is saturating,’ Eren Tal said, his face grim as he drove an iron sounding bar twelve inches into the ground near the wall’s toe. He pulled the rod back. The tip came out dripping with scalding liquid gray mud that had the consistency of warm porridge. ‘The deep water pressure behind the cut stone facing is building up. The rubble fill in the core has melted. If that water doesn’t find a vent, the entire four-hundred-foot terrace will tip over into these shops.’
