High above the lower city, on the trembling six-sided command platform of the Hollow Crown, Master Davin Sorell saw the brown mountain flood wave round the cliff at High Tor.
He stood three hundred feet above the boiling river, sheltered beneath the fluted copper dome of his central watching tower. The wind howling through the open arcade tore at the hem of his heavy wool and velvet robes. It whipped the gold academy embroidery against his boots. In his right hand he held an ivory-mounted sight prism, through which he watched the advancing wall of muddy water, crushed ice, and splintered hemlock boles.
The spectacle was terrifying, but Sorell’s thin, high-born face showed no trace of fear. Only a rigid, fanatical obstinacy that had hardened through twenty years of academy supremacy.
“Look at the volume, Master Sorell!” shouted Technician Orin, clinging to the bronze handrail beside the command console. “That’s not a seasonal freshet! High Tor has dumped its entire upper snowpack into the gorge! The inflow is exceeding eighty thousand gallons a minute!”
Sorell didn’t lower his prism. “A predictable seasonal variation, Orin. The counts of the Celestial Faculty have accounted for upland precipitation. The Crown was engineered to show the supremacy of unified command over the fragmented chaos of nature.”
