The cold afternoon wind whipped across the empty expanse of the Turning Basin mud flats. He carried the sharp, salty silt stench of low-water riverbed clay and the bitter tang of woodsmoke from the wagon drivers’ watchfires. In a cleared digging trench eighty yards from the main levee, Eren Tal and Korr Var had assembled a twenty-foot test water chute of heavy hemlock timbers, securely staked to the solid mountain stone with forged iron split-wedges.
Mounted inside the timber trough was a ten-foot section of Jo Saye and Dima’s composite reed-canvas sleeve, its outward-facing seam stitched with the tuned offering flax thread. The end of the sleeve was capped with a heavy iron blanking pipe rim connected to a portable high-pressure test ram operated by two long bronze hand levers.
Pella Rook stood twenty paces away behind a heavy hemlock safety screen, Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs in her left hand, her field notebook open on a timber stone stand. Beside her, Jo Saye watched through a narrow sight-slit in the timber shield, her face tense with focused concentration.
The air in the trench smelled of damp earth, boiled linseed oil. The dry, powdery pipe lime that had been dusted along the timber frame to reveal any tiny cracks or load-bearing bending under load.
