Down in the ancient Roman undercroft of Station Gamma, the great bronze edge gear of the Third Gate stood immobile beneath the vaulted stone ceiling. Its polished teeth locked the sector gate wide open to the Gray Rush. The torrent thundered thirty feet below the grating with an unbroken, rhythmic roar, but in the dry, lantern-lit machinery room, the work was moving into its final, permanent stage of clockwork fortification. The draft off the cold wet stonework smelled of ancient river silt, iron filings, and hot animal fat.
Master Garrow knelt beside the heavy ash gear bedplate, his massive blacksmith’s hammer resting beside his knee. On the timber bench lay the locking dog he had spent three hours forging during the last night’s watch. A four-inch-thick bar of tough, stringy charcoal iron, shaped into a heavy double-toothed pawl designed to slot directly between the bronze teeth of the main edge wheel and anchor into the solid granite stonework behind it.
‘No academy winch cable will ever drop this gate leaf again,’ Garrow growled. He lifted the sixty-pound iron pawl with his bare hands as if it were a pine shingle. He set the teeth of the dog directly into the root of the edge gear, aligning the three-inch pivot hole with the forged iron bracket anchored into the living rock.
