The stonework ledge along the western stone support prop was never designed for men carrying iron tools. The Great Sluice Crown was laid sixty years before Hal Rook took his first ferry across the Lower Reach. Then, the master builders had cut the service lip as a grudging afterthought. An eighteen-inch shelf of dressed millstone grit meant for grease-boys with animal fat buckets and hemp scrapers. Over six decades of lime-crusted slow leak, the river had gnawed at the outer corner until the stone sloped outward by two fingers’ breadth, slick with dark river weed and gray sulfur sludge. No railing had ever been drilled into the cut stone. In the academy doctrine of the old empire, an apprentice who lost his footing in the basin was simply recorded as a working inefficiency, replaced by the next applicant on the registry.
Pella Rook stood at the mouth of the staging gallery, her boots planted on dry flat stone slabs where the basin floor had not yet buckled. Her bottle-green apprentice tunic was stiff at the collar with dried river silt, the unpicked threads where the college crest had once rested now frayed into pale gray tufts over her heart. In her apron pocket, the flat bronze stop bell pressed against her ribs with every breath. A cold, heavy crescent that felt heavier than the three iron wrenches slung across her leather belt. Beside her, the drainage gutter gurgled with warm, bitter-salt runoff that smelled of boiled stone and wet dog…
