The brass float-needle on the reservoir gauge did not care about the women clinging to the willow hurdles on the north bank. It dropped with the smooth, indifferent weight of lead falling through grease, clicking once against the iron marker pin every twelve seconds.
Jon Hale kept his left palm pressed flat against the wet oak timber of the weir housing. Through the grain he felt the shudder of eighty tons of backed-up river water straining against the shut sluice gate, and beneath that, the deeper, duller tremor of the cold-water flumes running under Harth’s cobblestones to the foundation vault below the Lantern. Behind him in the control pit, Alden Bram stood with his thick legs braced against the slimy flagstones, both hands clamped on the iron winch bar. A smear of dark tallow ran from Bram’s knuckles to his leather cuffs, smelling of lard and ground graphite.
“Two minutes since the gate dropped on the fifth bell,” Bram said, his voice stripped of the quiet patience it carried when he was dressing ashlar. “That was the charter assembly’s measure. We started with seven minutes of water in the cistern, and the back-pressure is trying to heave four tons of oak straight off the granite sill. If that needle sinks past the five-minute floor before we lock the secondary pawls, the intake siphon loses prime and the crown machine down in the cellar drinks the reservoir dry.”
