When Jon Hale emerged from the valve-chamber trapdoor onto the broad stone sill of the North Weir, the river in front of Harth looked as though a giant hand had peeled back the dark skin of the flood to show the grey bones of the valley underneath.
Where five feet of churning brown water had raced over the weir apron three minutes before, an eighty-yard crescent of wet, gleaming limestone shingle and coarse river gravel now stretched from the western stone sill of the town gatehouse all the way across to the willow-choked eastern bank. Only a fourteen-inch sheet of foaming white slack-water still hissed through the low channels between the gravel bars, swirling around half-submerged boulders and trailing ribbons of green water-crowfoot before dropping into the lower pool.
Along the western edge of the stone sill—just inside the tall, rune-stamped iron boundary post that marked the northwestern corner of the Four-Cornerstone municipal ward—Captain Dain, Master Fisherman Harlan Pike, and Marris Gault were working at a furious run to lock the inner bridgehead in place before the fog parted on the far bank.
“Double-stack the gravel bags along the downstream lip of the apron so the current doesn’t sweep the children’s feet over the drop!” Captain Dain shouted, his mail sleeves splashed to the elbows with grey river mud as he and four watchmen slammed hundred-pound burlap sandbags down into a knee-high breastwork along the weir edge. “Gault! Drive those ash stakes into the gravel cracks twenty paces out and…
