Halfway across the foaming fourteen-inch slack-water of the exposed gravel spit, the limestone bedrock beneath Jon Hale’s boots gave a deep, hollow, grinding thud—a sound that did not come through the air or the rushing water, but straight up through the river-boulders from the subterranean granite flumes three hundred feet below the valley floor.
Thud-grate. Thud-grate.
It was the sound of massive, dry-heated granite blocks shifting against their mortise-pins as the hydrostatic pressure inside the Crown Furnace’s upper cooling jacket dropped below six minutes and the unquenched cast-iron core began to expand against its stone bed.
Along Jon’s right forearm, the four pale, braided bands of scar tissue—and the nine faint finger-ring marks of the earlier returns across his hands—prickled with a sudden, scalding needle-heat, as if the dying machine under the Old Hill were tugging blindly at the Keeper’s tether to ask why the river had stopped feeding its throat.
“Did you feel that under the shingle, Master Hale?!” Master Fisherman Harlan Pike shouted from ten paces ahead, where he stood up to his knees in the icy current holding the outer end of the tarred hemp guide-rope tied to the farthest ash stake. Across the boiling surface of the shallow channel, tiny strings of hot, sulfurous gas-bubbles were suddenly popping up through the limestone cracks in the riverbed, smelling of boiled iron and scorched lime.
