Jory Pell lifted his trembling hands. Then he pressed his calloused palms together, as if seeking to warm them against a memory that had stayed frozen for thirty-nine winters.
“It wasn’t eight o’clock when the riders came,” Jory began. His voice dropped into a raspy, steady beat that sounded like an ancient prayer recited in a tomb. “It was four in the morning. Two hours before the dawn bells. The autumn moon was high and yellow, hanging over the limestone bluffs. The river was making that deep, sucking groan it makes when the mountain reservoirs are full to the weir crest.”
Tomas leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees, his eyes fixed on the old man’s face. Nessa sat upon a low salt barrel, her land-mapper’s notebook resting on her thigh, her iron metal pen poised above the gray rag paper.
“I was up in the belfry loft,” Jory said. His blind eyes stared past the red embers. “I was seventeen. My father had paid four silver coins to the Watch Master for my apprentice badge. My duty was simple: strike the hour bell on the water-clock, oil the iron bearings with sheep fat, and watch the south levee for the warning flare from the upper water gate. If the water rose two feet above the green timber marker, I was to haul on the great bronze alarm bell until my shoulders broke.”
“And the riders?” Tomas asked quietly.
“Six horses,” Jory said, his voice tightening with sudden, sharp clarity. “Iron-shod horses coming up the rocky gorge at a hard trot. In those days, nobody rode big gelded chargers in the lower basin except the cavalry patrol of the North Weir Division. They stopped right at the base of the tower. I leaned out of the belfry shutter to shout down to them, thinking they were bringing the water warning from the High Sluice.”
He paused, his chest rising in a shuddering breath that rattled in his throat.
“A man dismounted. He had on a dark blue officer’s cloak with silver frog-clasps, high riding boots of polished calfskin. A cavalry saber that clattered against the mounting block. It was Captain Darven Holt. Everyone in the basin knew Holt. His father owned the high western orchards that never got water. He looked up at the belfry, his face white in the moonlight. He yelled: ‘Bell boy! The weir is secure! Council orders: maintain total curfew. You don’t touch that bell rope until noon on pain of hanging!’”
Nessa’s metal pen scratched across the paper with sharp, sharp-angled care. “And then?”
“I told him the water was already licking the red paint on the weir pier,” Jory whispered. His voice rose in distress. “I shouted down that the lower cottagers were sleeping, that if the flood came before sunrise, four hundred families would drown in their feather beds. Holt didn’t answer me. He turned to his sergeant—a big man with a broken nose named Dren—and he said: ‘Bar the dog in.’”
Tomas’s hands tightened on his knees. “They barred the belfry door?”
“From the outside,” Jory said, choking on a sob that sounded forty years old. “The tower door was five-inch heart of oak, studded with square iron rivets. Holt’s men carried a forged iron drop-bar and a heavy town padlock. I heard the bar drop into the stone sockets—clack-thud. Then the iron padlock snapped shut. I ran down the winding stone stairs in the dark, throwing myself against the oak until my shoulders were black with bruises. It was like throwing myself against the cliff face.”
“What about the bell rope?” Nessa asked, her brow furrowed in concentration. “The ropes hung down the center well. Couldn’t you pull the cord from the upper floor?”
“They had already thought of that,” Jory said, shaking his head with bitter grief. “Before they locked the lower door, two troopers climbed the outside check ladder to the bell deck. They carried rawhide thongs and animal fat-soaked rags. They lashed the iron clappers tight against the bronze sound-bows, wedging dry pine blocks between the clappers and the rims so the bells couldn’t swing an inch. When I hauled on the great rope with all my weight, it was dead. It was as stiff as an iron rod.”
Tomas stood up, his jaw set in cold, hard lines. “So you were locked inside eighty feet of stone while the water rose.”
“I was trapped there until two in the afternoon,” Jory cried. “I stood at the belfry shutter and watched the brown wall of mud and water tear through the lower hamlet. I watched the roofs of Willow Weir spin like shavings in the current. I heard the cattle screaming in the pastures. I heard the people shouting from the levee until the water covered them. And when Holt’s court guards finally unlocked the door at sundown, they dragged me down the stairs, threw me in the mud, and told the surviving townspeople that I had fallen asleep over a jug of pear cider.”
Tomas stepped close to the old man, laid his broad, calloused right hand upon Jory’s trembling shoulder. Then he held it firm.
“Did you write down what happened that morning, Jory?” Tomas asked softly. “Every apprentice keeper is needed to keep a duplicate daily slate.”
Jory looked up through his milky waterfalls, his jaw trembling. “I had my duplicate carbon slip. The yellow paper that the guild stationer gives to the tower watch. I wrote Holt’s name, the hour of the locking. The squad number stamped on the troopers’ saddlecloths. But I knew if Holt found it, he would slit my throat and drop me into the weir.”
“Where is it, Jory?”
“In the belfry clock,” Jory whispered. “The great iron striking clock has a hollow lead driving weight that pulls the gear catch gear. The bottom of the lead metal tube unscrews with a square copper key. I rolled my carbon slip in greased sheepskin. Then he slid it into the hollow lead before the water hit the village. If the tower still stands... The lead weight is still hanging from the drum.”
Nessa closed her notebook with a dry snap of the leather tie. Her gray eyes burned with cold anger.
“The Willow Weir tower was never demolished,” she said to Tomas, checking her pocket compass by the hearthlight. “The town engineers declared it structurally unsafe after the flood, pulled down the timber roof, and walled off the lower stairs with dry rubble to keep out vagrants. But the stone drum of the tower is four feet thick. If no one has dismantled the clockwork, the lead weight is still inside.”
Tomas adjusted his coat, turning toward the hospice door. “We climb the ridge at first light, Land-mapper. Let’s see what Holt left behind in the lead.”
Nessa Vale stood over her survey charts, her brass dividers clicking softly against the linen drafting cloth as she checked the angles of the high-pressure slope. Her sound horn hung from its velvet strap at her throat, catching the low murmur of the river wind and channeling the shakes into her ear. To Nessa, the city was not an abstraction of titles, charters, and noble coats of arms. It was a physical structure of dressed limestone piers, mortared abutments, and water-pressure pressures. A corrupt decree was simply a cracked keystone that would inevitably drop into the river.