The flood-watch bell at the Lowbank Market Arch was cast from seventeen hundredweight of dark tin-bronze in the year of the Great Ice Jam, a century before the Summoners’ College ever laid a foundation stone on the upper bluff. It hung in an open, four-pillar limestone belfry directly above the fish-market archway where Basin Lane met the main river quay, suspended from an oak headstock that had been oiled with neat’s-foot and sheep fat by four ages of the Tal family.
For the past five years, that bell had never once struck the Ordinary Mark after sunset.
Every evening at eight o’clock since Davin Sorell’s trade ring had throttled the lower weir to feed the Hollow Crown, old Marn—the one-armed night watchman who had lost his left forearm to a snapped tow-rope on the timber barges thirty years ago—had climbed the belfry steps, read the red-painted warning board sent down from the College Hydrographic Office. Then it struck the Three-and-One Cautionary Knell. Clang-clang... Clang. High backing-up pressure in the under-road drains. Cellar traps to remain weighted. Night boats banned below the piers. Parish sandbag gangs on thirty-minute standby. An entire generation of Lowbank children, including Tavi’s younger cousins, had grown up believing that the eight-o’clock bell was naturally four strokes long and meant stay away from the cellar stairs.
