As the rescue crew prepared the sled, Kel Dorr and Corvin Hest stepped before Pella with a handwritten diagram sketched on the back of an audit folio.
“Pella,” Kel said, his voice bright with intellectual excitement. “You don’t have to carry the whole river connection alone. That was the academy mistake. Sorell packed forty years of power into a single brain, and it drove him mad.”
“Look at this layout,” Corvin explained, tapping the drawing. “Three small, separate listening circles, each manned by an ordinary scholar using Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs. Kel sits at the First Gate water chute. I sit at the Second Gate water chute. You sit here at the Third Throat. Each of us holds only one third of Senn’s coordination set. If the signal becomes dangerous at any station, that listener drops his wire independently without crashing the other two.”
“A decentralized listening network,” Pella said, her eyes widening as she traced the lines. “No master summoner. No central pulpit. Just three equal listeners sharing the sound load, exactly like the three crews on the floodgates.”
“Exactly,” Corvin said, smiling warmly. “The river doesn’t belong to one person, Pella. It belongs to everyone who drinks its water. Let’s carry the load with you.”
