Four levels below the cobblestones of Lowbank, the air was warm, wet, and heavy with the smell of pipe lime and old rust. Water didn’t merely flow through the Third Gate undercroft. It screamed.
Ada Morland adjusted the leather squeezing sleeve around her left forearm, gritting her teeth as the stiff hide pressed against the puckered scald scar she had earned fourteen days earlier. The burn had healed to a mottled pink and purplish ridge. But the heat from the high-pressure drain tube made the skin throb with a dull, sickening ache. She ignored the pain with practiced tradeswoman discipline. She set her steel-toed boots firmly against the wet flat stone slabs.
In her right hand, she held her test listening rod. A three-foot bar of six-sided tool steel with a turned boxwood earpiece. She set the hardened tip against the cast-bronze casing of the Third Gate spindle. She pressed her ear to the wood. Then she closed her eyes.
Through the solid metal came the voice of the machine.
It wasn’t a mystical chant. It was the violent, chaotic bubbling blast of sixty cubic feet of water per second being forced through a thirty-inch orifice. Inside the bronze casing, tiny air bubbles were forming and collapsing against the valve face with the force of tiny sledgehammers, eating away at the cast metal in tiny, pit-marking bites.
