Midnight arrived over Lathmere without stars, without moonlight, and without mercy. The storm had consolidated into an unbroken, freezing gale that whipped the surface of the Gray Rush into great sheets of brown foam, driving the spray through the cracks of every shuttered window in Lowbank.
In the abandoned boatwright’s shed on the northern rim of the Ferry Turning Basin, three animal fat lanterns hung from the rotting pine rafters. He cast warm, swinging pools of yellow light over the heavy oak workbench. The shed smelled of damp sawdust, creosote, dry birch shavings. The ever-present, sour bitter-salt stench of churned river clay. Water dripped steadily through a hole in the cedar shingles into an iron bucket beside the door: drip... Drip... Drip.
Pella Rook stood over the workbench, her fingers raw and red from cold, checking the inventory lines on Kel Dorr’s slate board. Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs lay beside an unrolled roll of greaseproof tracing paper, weighted down by an iron drift punch to keep the draft from tearing it off the bench.
“Two manual oak sump pumps rigged in the drainage trench,” Kel reported, his voice hoarse from hours of shouting over the storm. His grease pencil traced the chalk columns on the slate. “Eren’s wagon drivers have forty gravel hampers stacked along the lower lip of the stone retaining wall. The three offering reed-canvas sleeves that Jo and Dima prepared are resting on dry timber cradles beneath the oiled tarpaulin.”
