At the western landing of Fen Hollow, Captain Sile Rook was inspecting the hull of his twenty-foot punted skiff. The boat was built of seasoned white oak three inches thick, its bottom and sides sheathed in heavy zinc plates fastened with square copper nails to resist the acid-burning acid of the lower drain pits.
Sile wore his high collar of stiff, boiled leather buckled tight to his chin, his eight-foot hooked pruning blade lashed to the port gunwale. Around his waist was an apron of greased cowhide. His massive hands were smeared with sheep fat mixed with lime powder to protect the skin against chemical water.
“The Black Marsh is six miles of stale poison, Tomas,” Sile said, not looking up as he tested a seam with his caulking iron. “The water doesn’t freeze in winter because the acid keeps it boiling at the bottom. If you drop a steel chisel over the side, it will come up pitted like an old tooth in twenty minutes.”
Tomas set his haul-pack into the center of the skiff, checking the gear. Two ten-foot spruce poles with fire-hardened tips, a coil of forty-foot tarred hemp rope, two pairs of thick cowhide gauntlets soaked in neat’s-foot oil, an iron pry-bar, and Nessa’s sounding lead.
Nessa stepped aboard, settling her land-mapper’s tripod and brass sound horn on the forward thwart. She wore a heavy linen cowl wrapped around her face, soaked in sweet vinegar to filter the choking sulfur fumes.
“What about the eels, Sile?” Nessa asked, pointing toward the dark reed beds where bubbles of swamp gas burst with a faint, oily hiss.
“The discharge eels are the worst of it,” Sile answered, spitting into the yellow scum. “They escaped from the old royal vivariums during the flood. They thrive in the warm, acidic runoff from the coal works. They grow eight feet long, thick as a cart driver’s thigh. They hunt in packs around underwater iron. A full discharge through the water will lock a man’s heart like an iron clamp before he can draw breath.”
Tomas took the forward spruce pole, planting the square metal ring against the granite landing slip. “Then we don’t put our hands in the water. We follow the stone canal bed.”
Sile leaned his broad shoulders into the long ash sweep, shoving the skiff off the gravel bank into the sluggish current of the drainage cut.
The shift from the fresh river water of Fen Hollow to the Black Marsh was abrupt and sickening. Within three hundred yards, the green river reeds vanished, replaced by stunted, blackened alder snags that rose from the yellow water like skeletal fingers. The air grew warm, thick, and choking. It smelled terrible, of rotten eggs, scorched pitch. The bitter, metal tang of packed burning acid.
A thick, rotten-egg haze hung over the water, cutting clear sight to fifty yards. Beneath the zinc bottom of the skiff, the water was solid and black as ink, with oily yellow slicks swirling in the wake of the sweep.
Tomas stood in the bows, sounding the bottom with his pole. The pole struck underwater timber cribs, sunken stonework blocks, and heaps of heavy-duty melted rock waste, each impact sending a dull, hollow shaking up through his arms into his shoulders.
Nessa raised her brass sound horn, holding the bell toward the water surface. “Current speed is half a knot southward. The canal banks are thirty feet apart, buried beneath four feet of chemical sludge. Keep the boat two points to starboard, Sile. There’s an iron grate collapsed in the channel bed ahead.”
Tomas adjusted his stance, feeling the balance of the boat beneath his boots. The haul of an honest carrier was not always carried over dry cobblestones. Sometimes the cargo lay deep in the kingdom’s forgotten sewers.
Every hundred yards along the drowned canal cut, the charred stubs of old town distance-posts jutted six inches above the yellow scum, their oak shafts eaten down to brittle black cones at the waterline by forty years of sulfuric burning acid. Tomas used the fire-hardened tip of his ten-foot spruce pole to fend the zinc bow off an underwater mound of glass-fused coal clinker that had washed down from the High Ward gas-retorts, careful not to let the wet wood drip onto his sleeves as he brought the pole back across the gunwale. The zinc sheathing of the hull scraped across an old iron tie-rod in the sunken towpath. Each time, a faint, greenish-white fizz of hydrogen bubbles trailed behind the stern. A visible warning of what the sump water would do to unprotected flesh or ungreased hemp rope.
In the center thwart, Nessa lowered a small heat gauge wrapped in a punched holes in horn tube over the port side, counting sixty seconds by her pocket watch before hauling it up with a waxed linen cord and wiping the black sludge from the glass scale with a rag dipped in lime-water. She recorded a bottom heat of seventy-four degrees despite the biting autumn chill in the air above the mist. The chemical reaction of the tannery lime-liquor mixing with the pyritic marsh clay generated a slow, nonstop underground heat that bred thick mats of pale sulfur-bacteria across the underwater brickwork. Beside her boot, she kept a two-gallon heavy clay jug of wet lime plaster wash uncorked and ready, with a sheepskin swab tied to a stick to stop any splash that crossed the oak coaming.
At the stern, Sile Rook steered with long, flat thrusts of his ash sweep, his scarred face half-hidden behind his vinegar-soaked linen scarf. He watched the oily surface ripples near the drowned alder roots. Twice during the second mile, a long, muscular shadow as thick as a stovepipe glided beneath the zinc keel, with a sharp, ozone-heavy crackle that made the fine hairs on Tomas’s wrists stand upright beneath his cowhide gauntlets and caused the compass needle on Nessa’s land-mapper’s plane-table to spin thirty degrees off north. The feral discharge eels were following the metal electric-shock current of the skiff’s zinc hull plates. It waited in the warm, solid burning acid for an oar blade to slip or a boot to break the surface.
To keep the static-electric hunting beasts from nesting against the copper nail-heads under the sternpost, Sile reached into a wooden tub by his boots and tossed two handfuls of coarse iron forge-melted rock waste fifty feet off the port beam into a stale eddy of yellow foam. Within seconds, the black water around the sunken melted rock waste boiled with pale blue arcs as three eight-foot eels came together on the raw iron, their bodies thrashing among the rotted willow snags. Meanwhile, Sile drove the skiff silently past on the opposite side of the underwater towpath wall. A veteran marsh watchman never fought the water directly when five pounds of scrap iron could buy fifty yards of clear channel.
Tomas shifted his grip on the ten-foot spruce pole. He used the dry ash markings carved at six-inch intervals along the shaft to call out the exact depth of the chemical silt over the stone canal pavers to Nessa. Despite the thick yellow fog that pressed down upon the lagoon like greased wool, his eyes tracked the subtle stonework joints of the underwater bank beneath the scum, reading the camber of the old towpath curb the way a cart driver reads the crown of a turnpike in the dark. Every hundred yards brought them closer to the deep basin where Sluice Station Three had settled into the clay. The rising warmth of the water beneath the zinc floorboards told him they were entering the main outfall of the High Ward drains.
Behind them, the gray towers of Bellwether were lost behind the yellow sulfur mist. The only sound was the creak of the ash sweep against the oarlock and the steady, rhythmic drip of black water from the blade.
Tomas gripped the spruce pole, his eyes scanning the murky channel ahead. The third seal was quiet, waiting for the weight of the fourth.