The Gray Rush was dropping an inch every two candle-marks. That left a fat, slippery band of gray river silt across the lower limestone stone retaining wall of the Lowbank ferry landing.
Pella Rook stood on the greasy stone apron with a stiff birch broom in her hands. Her cart driver boots, soaked through at the seams since yesterday afternoon’s second surge, squelched with every shift of her heels. The cold was the dull, adhesive cold of mountain runoff that had washed through twenty miles of shale gorges before hitting the city weirs. It smelled of churned gravel, dead willow weed, wet limestone. The faint, rotten-egg tang of boiler lime that still leaked from the shattered bypass channels on the upper terraces.
Above her, the great bronze rig of the Hollow Crown sat silent upon its granite piers. For five years that huge ring had hummed with the high-pitched shaking of stolen memories, its drain tubes pulsing like a fevered artery. Now it was merely cold metal, dull as a drowned kettle in the pale dawn light. The three physical river gates downstream were wide open, their oak leaves braced back against the stone piers with double chains. The river was breathing through its old, natural throat, brown and heavy with silt, but free.
