Four miles deep into the Black Marsh, the drainage cut dissolved into a vast, drowned maze of rotted hemlock wooden support posts, collapsed canal levees, and stale lagoons of black chemical slime.
The skiff moved with painful slowness. Sile Rook poled from the stern. His face was pale and grim beneath the vinegar mask, his breath rattling as he navigated the narrow channels between rows of ancient, moss-draped willow stumps.
Every few yards, large bubbles of marsh gas welled up from the muck, bursting on the surface with a foul, rotten-egg stench that made Tomas’s throat burn and his eyes water. The zinc plates along the skiff’s waterline hissed continuously as the acid water reacted with the offering metal. That left a crust of white zinc salts along the timber seams.
Tomas stood in the bows. His ten-foot pole plunged into the black water to feel for underwater obstacles. Suddenly, five feet down, the pole struck something metal. A hollow, ringing clink that traveled through the wood.
“Hold the sweep, Sile,” Tomas warned in a low voice.
Beneath the bow, the black water churned. A pale, bluish soft glow began to pulse three feet beneath the surface. A flickering, ghostly glow that outlined the thick, sinuous body of a feral marsh eel, its skin slick and mottled like rotten liver.
With a sharp, cracking snap like a coach whip, a bright arc of blue electricity discharged from the eel’s flank. It struck the zinc sheathing of the bow.
The impact sent a violent jolt through the skiff. The spruce pole in Tomas’s hands shook with a sharp, stinging shock that numbed his thumbs. Meanwhile, Sile grunted in the stern as the charge grounded through the zinc hull into the water. A sharp smell of ozone mingled with the sulfur reek.
Two more flashes cracked against the port side as the pack circled the boat, their blue arcs lighting up the underwater ruins of an iron water gate.
“Keep your hands inside the gunwale!” Sile rasped, holding the ash sweep clear of the water by its dry handle. “The zinc is taking the charge. But if one of those brutes touches bare flesh, you’ll be over the side before your lungs can scream!”
Tomas remained motionless, his boots planted wide on the dry oak floorboards, his quarterstaff grounded against the keel. He watched the blue flashes fade into the black depths as the eels drifted toward the warmer current of a heavy-duty outlet.
Nessa brought her sound horn to her ear, pointing the flared bell toward the southwest. She listened intently to the low, underground rumble that echoed through the marsh.
“Sound slope is shifting,” she reported, her voice muffled by the damp vinegar cloth. “The sound of falling water is two hundred paces ahead. The stone support pillars of Station Three are still acting as a weir, holding back two feet of head pressure.”
Sile dropped the sweep back into the water, steering the skiff through a narrow gap between two collapsed granite piers.
The mist parted slightly.
Rising out of the black lagoon like the prow of a sunken galleon stood the massive stone platform of Sluice Station Three. Built of heavy, dressed granite cut stone blocks mortared with high-pressure cement, the station had tilted four degrees to the south. Just then, the foundation wooden support posts rotted. But its upper terrace remained four feet above the acid water.
At the center of the platform stood the circular stonework low roof wall of the deep intake well, its rusted iron check cage rising into the yellow fog like a gibbet.
“There she’s,” Sile breathed, wiping chemical moisture from his leather collar. “Station Three. Forty years of mud, and the old stones are still holding.”
Before Sile eased the zinc bow against the underwater stonework apron, Tomas leaned over the starboard gunwale with his ten-foot spruce pole to probe the footing beneath the approach steps. Four feet below the yellow scum, the fire-hardened ash tip grated across a jagged iron rack. The remains of the trash-screen that had once kept river driftwood out of the low-level under-road drain. Two of the upright iron bars had been bent outward by the ancient blast wave. Just then, the lower dyke was blown. That left sharp, rusted through spikes pointing directly upward toward the keel of any boat that came in too fast on the port side. Tomas marked the hazard by dropping a weighted cedar buoy-block on a tarred cord beside the outer spike, giving Sile a clear three-foot lane of smooth granite cut stone along the southern wing-wall.
In the center of the skiff, Nessa unstrapped her brass clinometer and sighted along the tilted top stone ledge of the station’s low roof wall to verify the solid strength of the intake well before anyone set weight on the upper platform. Although the hemlock foundation piles beneath the southern corner had rotted in the anaerobic clay and allowed the massive stonework cube to list four degrees toward the lagoon, the linked dovetail stones of the circular well-shaft had locked under squeezing like a level arch. She noted in her waterproof field book that the original town water-gauge scale carved in Roman numerals up the eastern pier was still readable beneath a thin crust of yellow sulfur crystal. And that the highest stone stain left by the Year Forty-Two flood stood at eleven feet four inches, nearly three full feet below the Level Fourteen emergency mark claimed by the Restoration Council.
Sile unlashed a heavy canvas fender stuffed with greased rope-yarn and hung it over the starboard rail so the zinc sheathing wouldn’t strike a spark or scrape noisy metal against the granite pier as they glided in. In the stale silence of the Black Marsh. There, the dense sulfur fog acted like a sounding board over the water, the clank of an iron boat-hook could carry half a mile through the drowned willow brakes to anyone patrolling the outer drainage cuts. Working with silent hand signals, Sile feathered his ash sweep through the black sludge. Meanwhile, Tomas took up the bow painter, preparing to secure the craft to the high mooring ring above the acid splash-line.
Along the western flank of the stonework platform. There, the ancient diversion under-road drain emptied into the lower lagoon, an underwater timber cofferdam of squared bog-oak still projected six inches above the bubbling yellow scum. Tomas noted a row of forged iron eyebolts driven into the inner face of the oak baulks. The original chain-guides through which Sluice-Keeper Eska Dorn had lowered his fine-tuning weights during the autumn equinoxes before the flood. The iron rings were eaten half-through by forty winters of burning acid runoff. Even so, the mortised oak timbers themselves had pickled black and hard as bog-iron in the anaerobic peat water. He formed a solid underwater step between the channel bed and the lowest granite landing course.
Nessa leaned over the forward thwart with her wooden ruler. She measured the four-inch thickness of the white zinc-sulfate crust that had formed along the skiff’s solder seams during their four-mile transit through the marsh. She scraped a sample of the crystal-clear salt into a small horn vial to calculate the exact acid concentration of the lagoon water, warning Tomas and Sile that the crust around the lower water gate vent was bubbling with trapped underground pressure from the High Ward tannery drains. If they stayed too long on the lower steps where the stonework joints were fractured, a single burp of tightly packed marsh gas from the silted under-road drain pipe could send a geyser of boiling burning acid straight across the landing apron.
Tomas stepped to the gunwale, his rope coiled in his hand. He looked at the cracked granite steps leading up to the terrace. There, a heavy iron mooring ring was crusted with thick layers of yellow sulfur salts.
“Bring her alongside, Sile,” Tomas said. “Let’s see what Eska Dorn left in the well.”