The night wind off the northern moors had cleared the lingering sulfur steam from the gorge. That left the Turning Basin open to a vast canopy of sharp, cold autumn stars. Down in the wide retention basin, the once-furious torrent of sixty thousand cubic feet per second had spread across the forty-acre expanse of mud flats and reed beds, transformed from a destructive battering ram into a vast, shallow sheet of placid, dark water that lapped harmlessly against the willow-planted earthen dikes.
Pella Rook walked the stone levee crest beside Master Galt, her boots crunching on the coarse river shingle. In her left hand she carried Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs. Their polished surfaces reflected the yellow light of Galt’s storm lantern. In her right, her field notebook open to the water-mapping survey she had drawn before dawn.
The air was crisp and damp. It smelled of cold marsh clay, decaying willow leaves, and the sharp silt stench of settling riverbed mud. The hot, skin-burning odor of copper green rust had almost fully vanished, diluted and stopped by the millions of gallons of cool river water flowing through the lower cutwaters.
‘Look at that water line, Candidate Rook,’ Master Galt said. He pointed with his brass-bound cane toward the stone gauge pier at the mouth of the town canal. ‘The canal pool has dropped four feet and two inches since the high water gate was choked. The river is running three knots slower through the bridge arches. My lightermen can…
