The ceiling narrow high walkway smelled of old bird lime, rusted iron, and rotten-egg draft.
It ran along the high spine of the aqueduct for six hundred yards, suspended thirty feet above the roaring underground river by forged iron tie-rods anchored into the keystone granite. The metal planks were narrow—scarcely two feet wide—punched holes in with diamond drainage holes that offered a sickening, clear view of the boiling black whirlpools below. Every footstep echoed with a hollow, metal clang that shook through the iron framework.
The refugees moved in breathless silence, one hand clamped to the cold iron handrail, one hand clutching their meager bundles.
Master Corin walked in the middle of the line, his broad chest heaving under his torn dyer’s apron, his left hand guiding an elderly weaver whose knees were shaking with dizziness. Behind them walked Mira, her charcoal wool shawl pinned tightly at her throat, her left hand resting on the shoulder of a small boy whose parents had drowned in the lower under-road drains.
Her right arm hung by her side, its many-sided smoky quartz facets casting faint, rhythmic lavender prisms across the punched holes in iron floor.
Then, fifty yards ahead in the gloom, something fell from an upright drainage chute in the ceiling.
