Four seconds after Marris Gault’s brass whistle echoed down the subterranean gallery, Jon heard the river coming.
First came a cold, rushing wind pushed ahead of the water column—a sudden draft of thirty-four-degree mountain air that swept down through the nineteen breached cellar partitions, setting the tin reflector-lanterns swinging on their oak pit-props and blowing the lingering lime dust and tallow smoke out of the Low Sike trench.
Then came the water itself.
Released from the four-foot timber head-gate above Dunstan Harl’s bakehouse weir, a foaming, dark-green bore of icy winter river water—still carrying needles of broken surface ice and mountain pine-bark—came roaring down the two-percent stone gradient through Cellars One, Two, and Three.
From the threshold of Cellar Twenty, where Elin, Nell, and the digging crews stood pressed back against the dry side-walls on the raised flagstone walkways, they could hear each cellar take the flood in turn: the deep, hollow boom as the water hit the timbered drop-chute under Widow Moss’s parlor, the steady hiss as it glided over the puddled clay seams Iven and Briony Kell had sealed in Cellar Ten, and the rising, musical thunder as four hundred yards of separate family basements became a single living aqueduct.
