Down in the Low Sike trench, the men and women of the four digging teams stood in the drifting white mist with their faces turned up toward the dusk sky, listening to the long, thunderous exhale of the mountain vents overhead.
Inside the recessed limestone chamber in front of Jon, the transformation was immediate and physical.
Five minutes earlier, the cast-iron bell of the twenty-four-inch conduit had been hot enough to char horsehide leather and boil tallow on contact. Now, as the continuous torrent of thirty-four-degree winter river water poured out of the fourth pine box-flume and surged down the wide throat of the valve at six hundred gallons a minute, the violent hissing around the flange bolts died away altogether.
The dark gray iron of the pipe cooled from scorching heat to blood-warmth, then to cellar-damp, and within three minutes a fine, glistening skin of cold river sweat condensed across the outside of the valve housing and the wire-bound spokes of the wheel.
More than that: the deep, tooth-aching bass vibration that had been pounding upward through the bedrock of Harth since yesterday’s dusk—the runaway torsional hum of the three gold Furnace rings grinding against the brake of the Common Charter—dropped swiftly down the scale until it was no louder than the quiet, rhythmic purr of a watermill wheel turning in deep grease.
