The hum of the brass spindle filled the flooded water tank with a sound like millions of cicadas singing in a winter cellar.
Where the silver-grey threads revolved around the central gold-silver metal drum, the air turned semi-liquid. The reflections of the lanterns in the standing water began to run backward, ripples un-forming themselves and returning to smooth glass before the eyes of the stunned congregation.
Heresiarch Lyra stepped beside the humming engine, her hand resting gently on the brass casing.
“Sister Martha,” Lyra called out, her voice soft and inviting. “Come forward.”
From the third row of wooden sleepers, a frail woman in a threadbare wool shawl rose trembling to her feet. Her knuckles were swollen with the arthritis of thirty years scrubbing laundry in the tanneries. Her face was lined with deep, permanent furrows of sorrow.
“Martha,” Lyra said as the woman approached the platform. “Tell the congregation of your son, Julian.”
“He was nine,” the woman sobbed, her voice cracking across the water tank. “He was chasing a stray cat along the timber quays of the Third Lock... He slipped on the green slime... The river was in spring flood. We found him three leagues downstream in the reed beds two days later. That was fourteen years ago. I still keep his wool mittens in my tea tin.”
