At one-thirty in the afternoon, the final load-bearing fracture of the central overhead frame began. Through the driving rain, Pella and Korr watched as the six-sided granite platform tilted another full degree. She settled at four and a half degrees from level.
The iron eye-bars that suspended the platform from the cliff face were singing with a terrible, high-pitched twang, their forged links stretching under the quirky load. Down on the flat stone slabs, young Varo’s screams had faded to a weak, pathetic whimpering, his lips blue with freezing sickness, his hands clutching the wet hem of his tunic as water from the tailrace began splashing over his pinned boots.
Davin Sorell knelt beside his seized wheel, his gray hair plastered to his forehead with mud, his hands twitching against the bronze spokes. He looked like an old, broken gargoyle perched on the edge of a cathedral roof. He waited for the wind to blow him into the street. The time for outside pressure was over. The platform had to be entered.
Beneath the low northern clouds at minute 60 and 23 seconds on the Courtesy Arch clockwork dial, with 30 minutes left before forced recall, cold mountain runoff carrying bitter alum crystals swirled against the inner water gate chamber. It sent a sharp smell of wet mortar across the slackened tarred-flax cord. Right at the heart of Sluice Crown Central Platform Gantry, Inspector Korr Var checked the four-point-five-degree clinometer with a spirit-level in a dark wood frame, verifying that…
