For a long moment after the pale blue ripple sank into the cast-iron wheel, the only sound inside the vaulted stone chamber was the deep, even rush of the winter river pouring down the twenty-four-inch throat into the cooling jacket of Old Hill.
Jon reached down to the wet ash planks at his boots, picked up the empty, heat-split wooden bobbin from which the forty feet of wire had been unspooled, and hooked it onto his apron belt. Then he leaned his shoulder into the masonry breach one more time and laid his bare right fingertips directly against the copper-veined hub of the intake wheel.
The metal under his fingers was cool now, beaded with fresh river sweat, and completely solid. Where the three jagged spoke fractures and the split central boss had threatened to shear apart half an hour ago, the three-strand braid of spring iron and red copper had fused grain-to-grain with the gray cast iron. Even with a cold-chisel and a twenty-pound sledge, no smith in the valley could ever have separated the wire from the wheel again; they had become one piece of metal.
At that exact touch, a single line of calm, steady blue municipal script formed across Jon’s field of vision—not burning with the harsh, imperative glare of the Crown Furnace’s gold overrides, and enclosed in no brackets or artificial frames, but written in the quiet, ancient mason’s hand of the four foundation cornerstones:
