Alden Bram did not speak until he had walked out of the cramped back treatment room into the main kitchen and laid his six-foot graduated cedar dip-rod flat across the scrubbed dough-table, right beside the four-foot patch of new white-pine floorboards that covered the hole burned during the tenth life’s flume rupture.
Jon Hale followed him out, leaving Cael resting pale and conscious on the treatment bench under Elin’s watch, while Lady Signe Lorr and Sister Oda—walking slowly with one hand braced against the door-jamb—joined them around the table. On the windowsill above the wood-box, Button lifted its head from beneath its single sound wing and gave two low, questioning clicks of its beak at the wet cedar rod.
“Read the watermark for yourself, Jon,” Bram said heavily, tapping the tip of his brass plumb-bob against the darkened ring of river silt staining the painted white inch-marks on the cedar rod. “When we finished wiring the cast-iron valve wheel in the twentieth cellar at midnight, we had the upper mill-race cistern standing full to the brim—nine minutes of high-pressure cold water, plus whatever steady trickle the cellar flumes could carry.”
“And the west wall fire-brigades drew from the upper culvert manhole during the catapult bombardment,” Jon said, his eyes measuring the eighteen inches of dry wood between the top of the rod and the wet silt-line.
