BOOM.
Four tons of white oak and wrought wagon-tire iron slammed down into the hornbeam sill-groove of the North Weir with a shock that threw a six-foot curtain of bloody river spray straight over the sandbag breastwork and shook the granite masonry under Jon Hale’s knees like an earthquake.
Down in the valve chamber beneath the steps, the moment the four-ton gate sealed the by-wash aperture and backed the full five-foot head of the Harth River up over the vertical intake shaft again, ten thousand gallons of cold river water plunged straight back down into the parched throat of the subterranean cooling cisterns.
The ear-splitting scream of the brass steam-whistle choked off in a gurgling cough of wet vapour. On the ashlar wall of the intake shaft, the copper pointer—which had trembled one hair’s breadth below the red raddle-chalk line at numeral 5—stopped falling, quivered against the chisel-cut, and held steady at the five-minute floor.
Up on the wet flagstones of the inner weir ramp, inside the iron boundary post of the Four-Cornerstone municipal ward, a terrible, ringing silence followed the crash of the gate.
Along the inner lane leading up to the market square stood the thirty-nine surviving camp-follower families, the seventy shivering children wrapped in dry wool blankets with Elin’s warm salted rye-barley bread clutched in their hands, the twenty-eight baggage-carters, and the seven-year-old boy with the splinted club-foot whom Kessa Mill had lifted over the broken wagon-wheel thirty seconds before.
