The iron trip-wheel spun with a bone-jarring shriek.
Across three hundred feet of giant stone granite stonework, the high-pressure release dogs tripped at the same time with three bone-shaking, metal thuds that shook the bedrock beneath Tomas Reed’s boots.
Then, gravity took the delta.
The three huge thirty-ton balance weight boxes, freed from their chains, dropped fifty feet through the upright stonework shafts with a whistling roar of rushing air and spinning bronze gears. The twelve-foot bull-wheels blurred into shimmering circles of polished metal, their bronze teeth humming at a pitch so high it set the teeth of every man on the pier on edge.
At the bottom of the shafts, the three massive bronze-faced water gate gates rose.
They didn’t slide slowly. They flew upward twenty feet into their granite pockets in less than four seconds, disappearing into the piers with a hollow, echoing clang that sounded like the closing of an iron vault.
For one suspended heartbeat, the marsh went quiet.
The forty-foot upright wall of trapped marsh water—twenty-eight million gallons, forty-two thousand long tons of packed liquid mass—hung exposed in the breach, a towering, dark cliff of salty salt water.
