The deep sound hum that filled the Roman undercroft didn’t waver after Renn Vos drove the ash cheater bar home. It settled into the bedrock like the deepest chord of a massive stone bell. It shook through the soles of Pella Rook’s boots as she stood on the iron-railed service narrow high walkway. Below her, the dark, muscular volume of the Gray Rush swept through the Third Gate’s thirty-foot archway, moving not with the wild, bubbling blast-torn frenzy of an obstructed water chute, but with the smooth, rolling driving force of a river that had finally found its true bed.
Mist rose from the foaming apron where the discharge met the lower basin. He carried the cold, sharp scent of mountain granite, pine bark, and clean hemlock water. For four months, every cellar and under-road drain in Lowbank had reeked of the stale silt stench and the scalded stone salt water that Davin Sorell had pumped down from the High Terraces. Now, under forty thousand tons of rushing mountain flow, that chemical filth was being scoured from the bedrock channels, flushed out toward the salt water of the harbor.
Eren Tal leaned over the heavy bronze rail of the narrow high walkway, his flannel sleeve pushed back to keep clear of the dripping channel lines. He held his two-foot brass-bound folding rule against the chalk line they had struck on the eastern bridge pillar forty minutes earlier. ‘The head is dropping, Pella,’ Eren called across the roar of the water…
