The order went out across the lower wards through the speaking tubes, the brass bells, and the overhead tension wire: Abandon the Crown. Pivot to the Lower Gates.
At the Eastern Flume, Bessa Marr and four town guardsmen threw the heavy crab winch, dropping the dog-ratchets and raising the six-foot oak relief gate until the brown floodwater roared through the stone arch into the outer marsh. At the turning basin, Hesta signaled her crews with a red signal lantern. She opened the backup scour channel to full discharge. And at the Third Gate, old Renn Vos, his white hair whipping in the gale, wedged an iron pry-bar into the bronze sector gear. It locked the lower throat wide open to let the Gray Rush breathe.
The transformation was instant. The boiling river that had battered the central pier dropped four feet in seventy seconds, its striking force drawn away by three separate, honest, working channels. The thunderous, screaming roar of the Hollow Crown subsided into a dull, hollow whistle as its drain tubes sucked empty air, the red heat fading from its bronze casing, its seized gears finally coming to a dead, shivering halt.
Up on the high balcony of the Ferry Museum, Pella Rook, Eren Tal, and Corvin Hest stood beside the timber sled, their hands resting on the heavy manila hawsers. Below them, Davin Sorell knelt on a silent, tilted platform in the center of an empty channel, his power broken, his power put out by the water…
