At seven bells on the twenty-seventh evening, as the harbor tide down at Gray Rush Slipway reached low slack. Then it drew the heavy brown floodwater smoothly seaward, Pella Rook walked down the stone steps from the central bridge to the wet timber narrow high walkway overlooking the Third Gate throat and the Ferry Turning Basin. Waiting for her beside the three small chalked listening circles they had drawn during the afternoon crisis stood twenty-one-year-old Kel Dorr and twenty-eight-year-old Examiner Corvin Hest.
Neither of the two former academy summoners carried a silver-chased binding rod or wore a stitched ritual stole. Kel wore a borrowed wheelwright’s canvas jacket over his soaked wool shirt. Corvin had his dark coat sleeves rolled to the elbows after spending two hours helping the masons check the lime-mortar joints along the museum party wall.
Down in the wide stone bowl of the Turning Basin, the dark river swirled in a broad, counter-clockwise eddy before gliding through the opened marsh-channel water gate toward the lower estuary reeds. In the center of that deep eddy moved a vast, semi-clear shimmer of cold river-light. Not a human-shaped water god or a heraldic beast from a college mix, but the ancient, weary water-system mind of Senn.
