Three hundred iron pikes leveled in the dark made a sound like dry bones dragged across an iron grating.
The hollow bailiffs moved as a single organism. There was no hesitation in their stride, no human tremor in their leather-clad wrists. They were three hundred six-foot frames stitched from the tanned facial skins of drowned citizens, their hollow torsos inflated with the pressurized ammonia vapor of the sub-harbor vaults.
Each one held a six-foot municipal escheatment pike. The shafts were forged from pitted iron pipe salvaged from the waterworks sluices, tipped with curved, three-pronged gurney hooks that caught the cold white beam of the dwarf lantern.
Across the front rank, fifty iron hooks dipped to waist level, aimed directly at the rubber tires and steel tubing of Clara Vance’s transport gurney.
Gate Beta -- known in the original 1996 blueprints as the Probate Bridge -- stretched eighty feet across a pitch-black chasm of stagnant drainage water. The span was barely twelve feet wide, paved with frost-fractured Carrara marble blocks that were slick with frozen mineral condensation. On either side of the narrow walkway, there were no safety railings, only a six-inch granite curb separating the bridge from a sixty-foot drop into the flooded cisterns below.
