High above the river, the great ritual water shield—the forty-foot artificial curtain of tightly packed water that Davin Sorell had erected to impress royal ambassadors—finally ran out of power. Without the unvented suction of Senn’s captive spirit, the high-pressure head died in a matter of seconds.
The towering wall of water didn’t crash down upon the city in a destructive tidal wave. It collapsed backward into the newly opened discharge water chutes. It folded inward like a falling silk curtain and drained smoothly away through the turning basin into the south marshes.
On the marble stone railings of the Upper Terraces, the High Senate and the royal delegates watched in stunned, speech-bereft silence as the glittering, miraculous spectacle of the Hollow Crown vanished from the sky. That left behind only the cold, gray, honest granite walls of the ancient gorge. The magic was gone. The monument was empty. The river was flowing through its natural bed, indifferent to the pride of emperors.
The clock on the work-order slate stood at 49 minutes past one o’clock. Minute 84 and 50 seconds on the brass bridge pocket watch as cold mountain runoff carrying cold granite spray swirled against the Roman stone support prop toe. It sent a fine spray of clear runoff across the raised master stop-bell. Corvin Hest, working as the former academy judge turned town verifier, checked the subsiding forty-foot water curtain with a high-water datum telescope, verifying that the forty-foot water curtain collapsed harmlessly into the open water chute…
