The spray on the service ledge of the Third Gate was cold and constant. It drifted like fine needle rain across the dark limestone abutments. Pella Rook stood five feet above the rushing torrent, her boots planted firmly on the ribbed iron grating of the upkeep platform. Her hands gripped the cold brass handrail that Hal Rook had bolted to the Roman stonework twenty years earlier. The river was moving with a smooth, terrifying driving force, a solid sheet of dark green water sliding beneath the archway, its surface unbroken by boiling eddies or white standing waves.
Beside her, Renn Vos leaned his heavy forearms on the rail, his old woolen cap pulled low over his ears. He was warming his chilled hands around a tin mug of hot boiled tea. The steam rose into the cold mist. A lockkeeper of forty years didn’t look at a river with his eyes alone. He listened to the shaking in the iron rungs, the tone of the water shearing against the cutwater. The hollow thrum of the air trapped in the arch crown.
‘The hum is dropping,’ Renn said softly, setting his mug onto a dry timber bracket. ‘It was sixty-two cycles when we threw the lever. Now it’s down to fifty-eight. That’s the sound of the deep water, Pella. That’s the river finding the bottom of its bed.’
