Eight months after the venting of the subterranean shaft, when the first green shoots of winter-sown rye were pushing through the thawed black loam of the lower meadows, Jon Hale walked up the gravel towpath beside the dry aqueduct channel with a wicker basket of hot mutton pasties slung over his left arm.
The morning air at the upper weir smelled of wet limestone, slaked lime-putty, and fresh river spray.
Where the monstrous granite portcullis of the Chancellery’s intake sluice had once hung suspended above the narrow race—the gate under which Cael Ardent had wedged his greatsword and his right arm on the morning of the twelfth third day—the jagged, smoke-blackened military masonry had been dismantled down to the bedrock sill. In its place rose a wide, graceful semi-circular arch of dressed grey valley limestone, fitted with twin oak flood-paddles that any two mill-hands could raise or lower with a geared iron hand-winch to regulate the town’s water-meadows without ever letting a drop of water back into the sealed subterranean shaft.
At the foot of the timber centering-frame beside the arch stood Master Mason Alden Bram.
At fifty-eight, with Garrick Holt’s hinged steel splint strapped firmly beneath his leather gaiter and his horn-handled white-ash cane planted in the gravel, Bram no longer climbed the high ladders himself. Instead, he stood on the dry stone apron three paces back from the arch, squinting upward with the fierce, unsparing pride of a veteran choirmaster as six young masonry apprentices—three Harth parish lads…
