At dusk, the Ferry Turning Basin was the quietest place in Lathmere, not. That was because it was silent, but because every sound in the gorge finally belonged to the river itself.
Pella Rook walked down the narrow flight of granite check steps cut into the landward pier of the Lower Weir. Her lantern was held low so the animal fat light fell across the wet, silt-darkened treads. The air down here below the quay wall was ten degrees cooler than the street above. It carried the clean, stone sharpness of high-country snowmelt—wet slate, crushed hemlock needles, cold ironstone, and river moss—entirely purged of the scorched animal fat, ozone, and rotten-egg sulfur that had hung under the arches during the five years of the Hollow Crown’s operation.
At the bottom landing, three feet above the swirling eddies of the turning basin, stood the main manometric sight-glass that Hal Rook had installed thirty-two years ago. It was an upright bronze column six feet tall, bolted directly into the granite cutwater with heavy leaded iron dogs, housing a thick metal tube of heat-softened soda-lime glass imported from the coastal glassworks. Around the upper pipe rim and the brass petcocks at its base, a familiar crust of pale green copper green rust had formed over the decades, carefully wiped clear of the engraved scale lines where Hal’s hand-punched numerals marked the feet and tenths of river head.
