The freezing river gale shrieked through the open framework of the sluice gantry, ripping spray from the crest of the cataract thirty feet below and hurling it against Jon Hale’s face like crushed flint.
He straddled the twelve-inch white oak cross-beam, his knees clamped around the rough timber, his calfskin boots wedged into the angle where the diagonal iron brace joined the maintenance catwalk. Below his dangling heels, forty tons of greenheart oak gate hung suspended barely four feet above the riverbed, shuddering with an ominous, low-frequency hum as eight thousand tons of swollen autumn river water piled up against its upstream face. The river was a brown, churning monster, battering the cutwaters, clawing at the timber paddles, threatening to tear the piers from their bedrock sockets.
In his left hand, cold and stiffening in the sleet, Jon held the three-foot coil of copper-iron wire.
It did not look like common smith’s wire. Common wire was dull gray, pitted with forge scale, prone to kink and snap when turned around an iron shackle. This wire had been drawn through diamond dies in the ancient royal guilds of the eastern provinces, forged from an alloy of copper and high-carbon iron that possessed both the supple flexibility of flax cordage and the unyielding tensile strength of spring steel. It caught the flickering orange glare of the gantry torches, gleaming with a pale, reddish-gold sheen that seemed completely impervious to the river rust and the biting frost.
