The official forecast published by the Collegiate Faculty of Celestial Dynamics had predicted that the crest of the autumn freshet wouldn’t reach Lathmere until the afternoon of the twenty-ninth day. That forecast, stamped with the royal griffin and signed by eighteen senior summoners, was still pinned to the public notice board in the market square. By seven o’clock on the morning of the twenty-seventh day, the paper was soaking wet. Its purple ink ran down the cedar post in useless streaks, as six feet of brown mountain runoff roared past the lower steps of the City Hall.
The snowpack on High Tor had not melted in an orderly, exact progression. A massive heat fracture in the upper cirque had released three million tons of wet slush, rotten shale, and mountain ice into the upper gorge all at once. The surge had traveled down the narrow river canyon like an unvented piston, obliterating three timber bridges in the upland valleys and gathering thousands of uprooted pine boles into a floating battering ram that now bore down upon the gates of Lathmere.
In the upper gallery of the Ferry Museum, the floorboards shook with a nonstop, low-hum that set the brass gears of Hal Rook’s scale model spinning on their spindles. Inspector Korr Var stood with his hand on the window frame. He watched through his four-draw brass spyglass as the brown wall of water rounded the bend at High Tor. The brass tubes of the telescope were cold and slick with…
