Down at the southern edge of the Ferry Turning Basin. There, the backup relief water chute was scheduled to receive the diverted flood pulse, Inspector Korr Var was conducting a ruthless safety audit of the timber ramps and stone retaining wall slopes.
The rain had turned to freezing sleet that coated the red clay dikes in a greasy, semi-clear film that made walking dangerous. A man who slipped on these sixty-degree embankments would slide twenty feet down into the boiling slurry of the basin ditch. There, the undertow would drag him beneath the timber spillway before anyone could throw a line. Every footstep had to be deliberate, testing the clay before committing full weight.
Korr walked with the wide, planted stride of a retired sergeant of the town guard, his heavy iron-shod boots biting deep into the clay with every step. In his right hand he carried an eight-foot iron sounding rod. It was marked with cut cleanly inch notches along its six-sided shaft. The rod had been forged with a narrowed diamond point designed to measure soil thickness and pushback to shear failure.
Every ten paces, Korr drove the iron rod deep into the embankment, leaning his full weight onto the forged T-handle, feeling the pushback of the soil matrix with his calloused palms. Soaked red clay had a deceptive strength when dry. But once internal moisture exceeded eighty percent, the cohesive bonds between the tiny plates dissolved. That turned dense earth into an unconfined liquid slurry under water-pressure…
