Two hundred paces to the east, buried deep in the limestone cleft where the old relief canal drained into the salt marshes, Bessa Marr was standing on the winch platform of the Eastern Flume. The air here smelled of tidal mud, rotting reeds, and the cold iron of the heavy balance weights. In her hands, she held the forged iron brake lever of the main drop-gate, her boots resting on two dry cedar planks.
“Two notches open!” Bessa shouted into her brass megaphone. She looked up at the tension wire suspended between the stone props. “The dog-ratchet is seated in the third tooth! The gate is floating true in its bronze grooves. No binding in the guide-ways!”
She reached up with a gloved hand and gave the overhead flax cord two sharp, powerful tugs. Tug. High above on the museum roof edges, forty yards away, the brass bell answered with two crisp strokes that rang across the gorge. At the Third Gate pipe hub, Ada Morland nodded. She felt the water hammer ease in the bypass line. “Bessa has her water chute open,” Ada said to Eren Tal. “The eastern relief is drawing seven thousand gallons. That leaves only Renn Vos at the Third Throat. If Renn can turn his spindle, the triangle is complete.”
