The Grand Aqueduct Pipe of Low-Khorat was wide enough to sail a coastal hay-barge, provided the crew had no objection to rowing through total darkness beneath forty feet of solid mountain granite.
The water was no longer a sluggish stream of knee-deep filth. It rushed through the massive stone barrel-vault with an ear-splitting, nonstop roar. A black, churning river eight feet deep, carrying floating timber baulks, drowned pack mules from the wagon driver stables, and shattered furniture from the flooded apartments. The air was cold, damp, and smelled of lime silt, ancient moss, and the faint, sweet chemical ozone of raw glass-like crystal dissolving in river water.
Ren Vale stood on the stonework service ledge, four feet above the waterline.
His left hand held Mira’s left wrist in a steady, protective grip. The ledge was narrow. Barely thirty inches of slippery solid mountain stone, slimy with green river weed and slick with water drops that trickled down the curving walls. Behind them, stretched in a single, shivering file along the wall, walked the hundred and twenty-four refugees from the wine cellar.
Every four paces, an iron bracket bolted into the stone held a smoking torch of pitch-soaked hemp. He cast long, wavering orange shadows across the rushing black water.
