The skiff bumped against the slimy granite stonework of the landing terrace with a dull, wet thud. The stone was covered in a slippery, emerald-green carpet of acid-resistant algae that smelled of rotten cabbage.
Sile Rook right away caught the rusted iron mooring ring with the boat-hook, pulled the stern close. Then he stepped onto the lower stone step to make fast the heavy manila thick ship rope.
“The stone is slick as soft soap, Tomas!” Sile called out, his hobnailed boots sliding on the green slime as he threw a double half-hitch around the bollard. “Get the lady onto the dry terrace before the wake rocks the boat!”
Tomas helped Nessa onto the second step, her heavy land-mapper’s case resting securely on her shoulder. Tomas then stepped onto the terrace. He unhooked his pack frame and set it on a dry patch of granite.
Suddenly, from the ruined intake pipe directly beneath the mooring bollard, a violent underground surge of tightly packed marsh gas erupted.
With a terrifying, hollow roar, a geyser of boiling, skin-burning chemical water—black as pitch and boiling with packed sulfuric acid from the upper tannery drain pits—burst upward through the fractured stone joints, spraying directly across the lower landing.
Sile Rook was caught in the full fury of the blast.
The boiling chemical torrent hit him across his left shoulder, the side of his neck. His bare left forearm. His heavy wool coat began to smoke instantly, the fibers charring into black ash as the packed burning acid ate through the fabric like hot iron through butter.
A harsh, deep-throated scream of agony tore from Sile’s throat. The veteran warrior dropped to his knees on the slick algae, his hands clawing at his collar as the acid bit deep into the living flesh of his neck and shoulder.
Tomas leaped down the stone steps without pause.
Ignoring the splashing droplets that bit like fiery needles into his own leather trousers, Tomas caught Sile by the waist of his cowhide apron, hauled the massive sixty-year-old warrior backward out of the spray zone. Then he dragged him up onto the dry granite terrace.
“Nessa! The lime wash!” Tomas roared.
Nessa was already on her knees beside the fallen captain. From her field survey kit, she seized a baked-clay flagon of soaked wet lime plaster water. The universal neutralizing wash carried by canal engineers.
With steady, ruthless speed, Nessa tore away the smoking leftovers of Sile’s wool coat. She exposed his neck and shoulder. The sight was horrific. The skin had turned a mottled, weeping white and yellow, with huge, blistered welts rising across the upper back muscle and running down his forearm to the wrist. The acid was continuing to eat into the fat under the skin, sizzling softly in the cold air.
Nessa emptied the entire flagon of lime wash directly over the burns.
A thick, white froth boiled across Sile’s raw flesh as the bitter-salt lime fought the sulfuric acid. Sile arched his back, his teeth grinding together with such ferocious force that blood trickled from his lower lip, his fingers digging into the granite cracks until his nails tore.
“Hold him, Tomas!” Nessa commanded, her voice trembling slightly but her hands moving with clean, steady care. She poured sweet neat’s-foot oil over the stopped tissue, then wrapped the entire shoulder and neck in clean linen bandages soaked in vinegar.
Sile collapsed back against the stonework, his breathing ragged, shallow, and whistling through clenched teeth. His face was gray as wet ash, bathed in cold sweat.
“The... The mooring line...” Sile gasped, his right hand weakly clutching Tomas’s wrist. “Did the boat... Hold?”
Tomas looked down the steps. The zinc skiff was safely snubbed against the bollard, bobbing gently in the yellow scum.
“The boat is secure, Sile,” Tomas said, his voice deep and steady. “And so are you. Rest your back against the low roof wall. You don’t move an inch until we’re ready to leave.”
Sile closed his eyes, his chest heaving under the bandages. “The well, Tomas... The brass float is down there. Don’t let my burned skin... Be for nothing.”
Before approaching the central shaft, Tomas knelt beside Sile and laid Sile’s eight-foot iron-shod hooked pruning blade across the dry granite flags within immediate reach of the veteran’s uninjured right hand, propping his pack frame behind Sile’s right shoulder so the older man could sit upright with a clear line of sight down the landing steps. The under-skin chemical burn was drawing body heat out of Sile’s torso at an alarming rate. Because of that, Tomas unbuckled his own heavy oiled-wool cape, folded it double to keep the acid-spotted hem away from the bandages. Then he tucked it tightly around Sile’s legs and chest. Even in shock, Sile’s scarred right fingers closed automatically around the seasoned ash shaft of his hooked pruning blade, his thumb finding the balance notch he had worn smooth over thirty winters of parish watch duty.
At the lip of the circular stonework low roof wall, Nessa used her ten-foot sounding line and a punched holes in brass cup to test the gas pocket hovering above the black drain tube water twelve feet down. An underground blow-hole erupted under a drowned water gate. Then, the escaping marsh methane and hydrogen sulfide often settled in the stuffy well-head. He waited to suffocate a diver before his boots touched the bottom rung. Watching the animal fat test-flame inside her Davy safety gauze flicker with a narrow blue cap and then burn clear yellow as the draft through the broken under-road drain ventilators cleared the shaft, she confirmed that the blow-out at the mooring bollard had vented the main pressure pocket outward into the lagoon rather than into the recording chamber.
Tomas stood at the iron ladder-head and step by step strapped the dual cowhide gauntlets over his sleeves, binding the wrists tight with tarred twine and smearing a fresh quarter-inch layer of lime-animal fat paste over his knuckles and the leather seams of his boots. He checked Eska Dorn’s glowing-bronze fine-tuning wrench in his belt loop, slung a small canvas salvage bag over his shoulder. Then he tested the top iron rung of the well ladder with a three-pound blow of his mason’s hammer to be certain the anchor-bolts had not rotted loose inside the granite joints. Every movement was deliberate, unrushed. Then he anchored in the basic trade rules of heavy salvage: test the iron, vent the shaft, and secure the line before taking the weight.
Beside the low roof wall, Nessa mixed a second heavy clay flagon of bitter-salt wash from her reserve sack of dry burning lime powder and canal water. She set the vessel on a flat stone block between Sile’s knee and the well-head so it would be ready the moment Tomas surfaced from the shaft. She tied a forty-foot knotted hemp signal-cord to the brass handle of her bullseye lantern, checking the horn lens and trimming the animal fat wick so the beam would cut straight down through the damp blackness of the twelve-foot metal tube without smoking the glass. Down at the foot of the landing steps, the acid geyser had subsided into a slow, oily gurgle between the fractured cut stone blocks. That left the green algae bleached white where the runoff of Nessa’s lime water had washed into the lagoon.
Tomas stood up, his jaw set in cold, unforgiving lines. The smell of scorched wool and charred flesh stayed in the air, mingling with the sulfur fumes.
He walked to the center of the terrace. There, the circular mouth of the intake well opened like a black pit into the foundations of the station.
He looked down into the darkness. Twelve feet below, the surface of the drain tube water was motionless, black, and silent. He drew his iron crowbar from his pack.
“I’m going down, Nessa,” Tomas said.