At eight bells on the twenty-seventh evening. Meanwhile, the main flood crest continued its steady, controlled passage through the three gates and the marsh bypass, Senior Municipal Engineer Korr Var walked along the lower wharfside lane of Fish Street with a horn lantern in his left hand and his waterproofed damage-check ledger under his arm. Pella Rook and Master Tailor Dima Fen walked beside him in their tall greased cart driver boots, checking the chalked high-water marks on each cellar inner wall between the Old Ferry Slipway and the southern laundry bridge.
In the romantic tales favored by the Upper Terrace salons. Just then, a city was saved from a great flood, every stone stayed bone-dry and nobody paid a penny in damage. In the real physics of a thirty-year mountain thaw passing through a low-lying river ward sitting barely eighteen inches above winter datum, saving the apartments and workshops needed planned, honest tradeoffs.
At Number 28 Wharf Lane—the lowest point of the harbor curve beside the salt-curing sheds—Korr Var halted before four sunken limestone storage cellars whose heavy oak inner wall doors had been deliberately unlatched and marked with white chalk crosses the day before.
Holding his lantern over the stone steps of Vault Four, Korr Var lit up fourteen inches of calm, muddy river backwater covering the lower flat stone slabs. Because Foreman Eren Tal’s draymen and Cooper Hobb’s apprentices had spent four hours the last afternoon hauling every barrel of winter cod, every sack of curing salt…
