Eren Tal could build a watertight wooden water chute in the dark with a hand adze and three dozen cut nails. But he had never built one. Meanwhile, the bedrock under his boots hammered like a galloping heavy cart horse. In the sodden mud of Master Orv’s rear yard, rain mixed with wood smoke and coal soot, swirling in greasy pools around his knees.
Behind him, the back wall of the Nine Lanterns rose four stories into the low gray sky, its timber frame groaning every time the underground high-pressure blast wave bounced against the cast-iron flap valve below. Each metal thud—clonk... Clonk... Clonk—shook loose flakes of wet stonework from the chimney stone wall-brackets.
Eren had four twelve-foot cedar boards laid across two sawhorses. With swift, rhythmic strokes of his drawknife, he planed the tongue edges so they would seat tight against the grooves, the fragrant curls of wet cedar shavings dropping into the yellow slush. Beside him, Tavi worked a hand bellows on a portable charcoal firepot, heating a cast-iron kettle filled with black pine pitch and animal fat.
Pella came running out of the basement coal chute, her knees gray with river sludge and her hair plastered to her forehead. She carried a three-inch threaded iron nipple and an adjustable pipe wrench she had fetched from Ada’s emergency pack before the specialist returned to Harrowby. The iron nipple smelled of cutting oil and pipe lime.
‘Ada’s gauge in the cellar is reading sixty-two pounds, Eren!’ Pella shouted above the drumming rain and the clattering roof gutters. ‘The lead sleeve under the bakery is weeping stone salt water. The baker’s boy just ran down Fish Street screaming that his flour bags are sweating!’
‘Then tell Tavi to bring that pitch kettle!’ Eren barked, driving a square cut nail through the overlapping corner of two cedar planks with three heavy strikes of his framing hammer. ‘Hold this side-board plumb, Pella! Don’t let the seam twist!’
Pella grabbed the cedar board, bracing her shoulder against the sawhorse. The wood was cold and slick, but as Eren drove the nails home, the joint closed tight. Eren grabbed a fistful of tarred hemp oakum from his apron pocket, jammed it into the corner seam with a dull calking iron. Then he poured a smoking stream of melted pitch directly along the groove.
The hot pitch hissed against the wet timber. It sent up a sharp, pine-scented cloud of white vapor that cut through the foul silt stench of the alley. Eren didn’t wait for it to cool. He flipped the trough over, nailed the opposing side-plank. Then he sealed the inner angle with a second layer of boiled pitch.
He worked with the wild, clockwork smooth speed of a man caulking a bilged hull on a falling tide. Every joint had to endure not only static water weight, but the pulsing moving surges of the high-pressure rebound. He notched the frame stand caps with his adze. He locked the cedar U-trough into place with dry ash wedges so it couldn’t jump from its mountings.
Eren checked the posture of the wooden water chute with his folding wooden ruler, ensuring that each twelve-foot section kept a clean overlap of four inches. At the joints between sections, he wrapped the outside in heavy strips of boiled reed canvas Dima had prepared, lashing the cloth tight with tarred marline to prevent side-splatter.
In less than twelve minutes, they had forty feet of rigid, U-shaped wooden water chute assembled across the yard. The trough rested on six rough timber frame stands Eren had knocked together from scrap heavy cart timbers, pitched at a steep four-inch fall per rod. The intake end plunged through the cellar coal chute directly into the tapped boss above Hal Rook’s old valve collar. The discharge end hung suspended over the gaping square opening of the 1860 rainwater water tank.
The water tank was a massive, underground stone vault twenty feet deep, built eighty years earlier out of dressed river granite and sealed with high-pressure lime mortar. Eren had pried off the rotting oak cover planks ten minutes ago. He looked down into the black deep pit with his horn lantern. He could see only dry dust, discarded wagon wheel rims, and spiderwebs.
Around the rim of the water tank opening, the ancient limestone blocks were stained with green patches of copper green rust where old bronze pump pipes had been removed decades ago. The cold air rising from the vault smelled of dry stone and dead beetles, undisturbed since the city water lines had been laid.
Eren drove two heavy iron stakes into the mud beside the water tank lip, securing the end of the wooden water chute with cross-braced struts. If the discharge water chute whipped loose under full high-pressure flow, forty gallons of boiling salt water would wash across the yard like a broken milldam.
‘Boss is cleared!’ Pella yelled from the cellar hatch. ‘I backed the plug out with the wrench! Screw the nipple home, Eren!’
Eren ducked through the low brick archway into the coal bunker. The air inside was stifling, ninety-five degrees and thick with copper green rust and sulfur vapor. He clamped the threaded iron nipple into the tapped boss on the collar, hauled down on the pipe wrench until the threads bit into the cast iron. Then he wedged the mouth of the wooden water chute directly beneath the open discharge.
He tightened the union collar with two sharp blows of his mallet. He felt the hot iron casing vibrate against his knuckles. ‘Turn the throttle cock!’ Eren yelled.
Pella hauled on the bronze lever with an iron cheater pipe. With a screech like tearing sheet metal, the high-pressure water behind the flap found its sky relief.
A roaring column of scalding, frothing stone water erupted from the pipe into the wooden trough. The cedar water chute bucked wildly on its frame stands, creaking under the sudden load of two hundred pounds of moving liquid. Warm yellow foam surged over the edges, but the pitch-sealed joints held true.
Eren scrambled out of the cellar just in time to see the torrent reach the yard. The stream shot through the wooden trough at six feet per second, a steaming, bubbling yellow clouded eye that launched off the end of the water chute and plunged twenty feet into the black depths of the dry water tank.
The sound of the water striking the stone floor of the water tank was an amazing, echoing roar—a thunderous waterfall echoing inside a cathedral vault. Dense white steam poured out of the water tank hatch. It rose twenty feet into the freezing rain like a geyser.
Instantly, the rhythmic, metal hammering beneath their feet stopped.
Deprived of its rigid, closed-pipe blast wave, the sound rebound died. The striking force of the College’s deep drain tube was no longer smashing against the lead pipes of Cooper Lane. It was expanding safely into ten thousand gallons of empty air. It drained away its heat into the massive granite walls of the old water tank.
Tavi stood by the sawhorse, the wooden tongs still in his hand. He stared into the steaming water tank hatch with his mouth wide open. ‘Eren... Look at the level!’
Eren knelt at the edge of the stone curb, shining his lantern down into the vault. The dry bottom of the water tank had fully vanished. A churning, swirling lake of steaming stone water was rising rapidly up the stone walls, creeping over the discarded wagon rims at a foot every three minutes.
He checked his pocket watch against the rising water mark on the stone wall. ‘Two thousand gallons,’ Eren calculated quietly, wiping rain and sweat from his gray beard with his sleeve. ‘Two thousand gallons of boiling salt water in under twenty minutes. If that had stayed in the pipes, half of Fish Street would be in the river right now.’
Pella leaned against the cedar frame stand, her breath coming in ragged, steaming gasps. Her oilcloth coat was soaked through, her hands were raw from the cold iron wrench. But the street beneath her boots was utterly still. No tremors. No whistles. Just the steady, peaceful roar of water pouring into an honest wooden water chute.
The yard was already drying as the vapor blew down toward the river. From the neighboring alley, two bakery boys poked their heads around the brick wall. Their eyes were wide as they saw the massive steam column rising harmlessly into the winter sky.
She reached into her pocket, felt the four silver coins Master Orv had paid in advance. Then she looked up at the quiet windows of the boarding house. ‘Get your notebook, Tavi,’ Pella said, her voice clear and strong. ‘It’s time to show Master Orv what seven silver coins of honest trade looks like.’