The Thousand Steps of Lathmere were not designed for the convenience of wagon drivers or tradesmen. They were a massive flight of gray granite stairs carved directly into the living river bluffs. They rose three hundred and forty upright feet from the greasy mud of the Lowbank slipways to the clean marble plazas of the High Terraces.
Pella climbed with a slow, steady pace, her new iron-capped boot soles striking each granite riser with a dull, ringing clack. In her right hand, she carried Hal Rook’s heavy cedar map metal tube, balanced against her hip. In her left, she held her leather tool roll, containing her brass measuring tongs, two grease pencils, and the small slate tablet bearing Ada Morland’s Bourdon tracking data.
With every fifty steps she climbed, the physical character of Lathmere changed like layers in an archaeological trench. At the base of the cliffs. There, the steps began among the fishmongers’ sheds, the air was dense with the rotting silt stench of low tide. It mixed with the bitter steam venting from the cracked stone floor drains.
The walls of the lower retaining embankments were dark with wet stonework, crusted with weeping patches of white pipe lime and green slime where hot sulfur groundwater leaked through the mortar seams. Every few yards, a rusted iron drainage gully bubbled with gray foam. It spat warm stone droplets that smelled of stale river gravel and scorched metal.
Pella observed the stonework joints along the lower hundred steps. The mortar had begun to fret away in long, crumbly runnels, weakened by the constant percolation of bitter-salt water. Hal had noted thirty years ago that when lime mortar is exposed to water above fifty degrees, the calcium hydroxide dissolves and leaves behind loose aggregate. The lower terraces were literally washing away from the inside out.
By the three-hundredth step, she passed the intermediate terrace of the grain factors and timber merchants. Here, the retaining walls were drier, heavy with massive blocks of dressed gritstone. But the iron street grates still hissed with a faint, persistent hum—the sound echo of the deep drain tube shaking through the bedrock thirty yards beneath the slope.
She saw two town watermen leaning against an iron rope winch, smoking clay pipes. They wore heavy leather boots and brass badges stamped with the town wave crest. They looked at Pella’s dark serge coat, their eyes lingering on Hal Rook’s three-oar buttons with a flicker of recognition. Older workers along the river remembered Hal. They remembered the man who would crawl into a collapsed under-road drain with an animal fat dip. Meanwhile, the academy masters stood on the wharf shouting Latin.
Pella paused on a landing near an old water trough to catch her breath. She pulled out a clean cotton handkerchief and wiped a film of sweat from her neck, careful not to wrinkle the stiffened linen collar Jo Saye had provided. The mother-of-pearl studs held firm against her throat, anchoring her stance.
She reached into her coat pocket and touched a crust of sourdough crust Sister Merrow had wrapped in oilcloth. That let the familiar smell of caraway and baked rye steady her racing pulse. She took a sip of cold water from her tin flask. She remembered the bitter, comforting taste of the boiled tea they had shared around the kitchen table only an hour earlier.
At the six-hundredth step, the granite stairs gave way to fine white limestone flags, polished smooth by ages of academy porters and aldermanic carriages. The smell of Lowbank’s mud dropped away entirely, replaced by the perfume of clipped boxwood hedges, crushed gravel paths, and the delicate, clean spray of town water fountains.
Pella paused on the terrace overlook, resting her hand on a carved stone railing. Beneath her boots, Lowbank lay spread out like a crumpled gray rag along the river’s curve. From this height, the disaster unfolding in the lower wards was visible not as an abstract crisis, but as physical geography.
Plumes of white vapor rose quietly from cellar grates along Fish Street. It drifted over the ferry roofs like the breath of a dying animal. The river itself was swollen and turgid, its brown waters pushed against the southern stone retaining walls by the unseen discharge of the High Sluice turbines.
She looked down at the street gutters flanking the High Terrace walkway. Despite the heavy morning fog that had blanketed the valley an hour earlier, the marble gutters were bone-dry. Not a single puddle of standing water marred the clean white flat stone slabs. The rainwater runnels had been carved with double inverted traps, feeding into hidden under-road drains that carried every drop of surface drainage straight down into the lower ward’s sewer mains.
On either side of the wide avenue, fancy stone fountains gushed with crystal-clear water. Their plumes leapt ten feet into the air before falling into tiered marble basins carved with dancing water nymphs. The fountains didn’t operate on town pumps or waterwheels. They were driven entirely by the huge static head of the Hollow Crown drain tube. They used forty pounds of diverted river pressure to create an illusion of easy abundance.
Pella touched the stone rim of the nearest fountain. The water was icy cold, drawn directly from the deep mountain currents of the upper gorge, while three hundred feet below her heels, Sister Merrow’s tenants were wading through sixty-degree sulfur foam to save their winter flour.
The bronze nozzles of the fountain were crusted with delicate rings of green copper green rust, polished at the tips by the constant flow of alpine water. There was no lime scale here, no boiling steam, and no fracturing clay. The High Terraces enjoyed the beauty of the river’s speed. Meanwhile, Lowbank absorbed its violent exhaust.
She noticed a brass check hatch set into the marble flags near the fountain base. It was stamped with the academy seal and the date. Year 12 of the Great Crown. Pella knelt on one knee. She pressed her bare palm against the bronze cover. The metal was ice cold, but through the bronze plate she could feel the tell-tale high-pressure thrum. A high-hum shaking that matched the ninety-hertz hum she had felt in the sub-larder vault. It was the same water, the same river, linked by an invisible chain of pressure.
She took out Hal’s brass measuring tongs. She laid the hardened jaws across the spreading joint between two marble flat stone slabs beside the fountain. The joint gap measured eight tiny fractions of an inch. A tiny fraction of an inch wider than the tiny limit specified in Hal’s original plaza plans. Even up here on the heights of Lathmere, three hundred feet above the mud, the huge underground backing-up pressure was pushing the living bluffs southward toward the river. The mountain itself was bulging.
Across the western ridge, three huge academy water towers rose eighty feet into the sky like bronze giants, their cedar staves banded with hand-hammered copper hoops. They were designed to hold forty thousand gallons of clean mountain water under gravity head, reserved only for the masters’ private botanical conservatories and heated baths. Down below, thirty children shared a single bucket of murky well-water, while up here, forty thousand gallons sat in silence behind polished brass stopcocks.
“Wasting twenty gallons a minute just to make white foam for the judges,” Pella murmured. Her fingers tightened on the cedar map case. Her stiffened linen collar held her chin firm. That kept her eyes fixed on the towering white facade of the High Sluice Council Hall ahead.
The building was a huge neoclassical temple of white Carrara marble, its pediment supported by twelve fluted columns thirty feet high. Carved above the bronze portal were the three grand symbols of the College of Summoners. The Trident, the Open Book, and the Bound Dragon. Armed beadles in polished steel breastplates and blue velvet surcoats stood at the top of the broad flight of steps. Their axe-spears shone in the pale morning sun.
Pella approached the upper roofed porch. Then, the iron boot-caps of her boots rang loudly against the smooth marble stone floor. Two academy clerks in trailing indigo robes paused by a carved sundial. That turned to stare at the young woman in the heavy navy wool coat with brass oar buttons. One of them raised a scented linen handkerchief to his nose, as though the mere presence of someone from the lower slipways might contaminate the delicate mountain air of the terrace.
Pella didn’t flinch. She adjusted the strap of her document case, took a deep breath of the cold air, and marched straight toward the main bronze doors. The bells of the High Sluice clock tower began to chime the three-quarter hour before nine, their deep, bronze tones rolling across the city like distant thunder.
She took out her tally slate and checked the small brass indicator. Ada’s Bourdon gauge was holding true thirty-two feet below the river, logging forty-two pounds of pressure with every tick of the clock. The numbers didn’t care about marble columns or velvet robes.
She was five minutes early. In her pocket, Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs clicked softly against her tally slate. A quiet, clockwork reminder that while the High Terraces owned the marble, Lowbank held the measurements.