The mental load that poured through the copper wire into Pella’s mind was almost physically crushing. It felt as if forty tons of dark, high-pressure river water were being forced through an opening the size of a keyhole. Inside the knot of Senn’s captive mind, three hundred and forty years of seasonal floods were tightly packed into a single, chaotic, painful point of total thickness.
She saw the ancient river valley as it had existed two hundred years before the first stone of the Summoners’ College was quarried. Wide, braided gravel channels winding through endless forests of gray alder and black willow. Seasonal salmon runs that set the water boiling with silver scales. And the quiet, wooden skiffs of the early ferrymen who crossed the river with three strokes of an ash oar. Then he dropped a copper penny into the shallows as an honest toll.
And over that ancient, peaceful memory lay the terrible iron shape of the last forty years: the ear-splitting clang of pile-drivers sinking bronze caissons into the bedrock. The blinding violet flares of Sorell’s binding circles. The painful choke of the extraction drain tubes drawing raw heat energy from its living currents. And the screams of forty-seven backup spirits chained to iron rails until their minds dissolved into gray stone dust. The spirit was drowning in its own remembered pain, unable to tell whether the current was moving forward to the sea or backward into the cage.
