The floor of the Eleanor Gorge was a cold, sunless deep gap where the roar of white water wiped out all human speech.
Tomas Reed picked his way down the final shelf of wet black slate, his hobnailed boots finding purchase in the fissures of the riverbed. The seventy-pound ash pack frame pressed heavily into his shoulders. But he kept his hips loose. He used his peeled ash staff to probe the depth of the stale pools that lay trapped between the boulders. His left forearm ached with a dull, throbbing intensity where the cold mountain mist had stiffened the scar tissue. Every ten paces, he paused to flex his fingers inside his split-leather glove, thumb-to-index, thumb-to-middle, thumb-to-ring, thumb-to-little finger. He felt the tight drag of the gristle before setting his weight back against the grade.
The sense air of the gorge floor was overwhelming and grim. It smelled of stale river scum, rotten slate, wet lime. The cold, rotten-egg stench of groundwater that had seeped through underground coal seams. Above them, towering into the gray morning sky like titanic stone cliffs, the three tiers of Saint Eleanor’s Aqueduct spanned the two-mile deep gap. From this angle, looking up from the bedrock, the sheer, crushing mass of the monument was terrifying. Thousands of dressed granite cut stone blocks, suspended one hundred and eighty feet in the air, weeping nonstop sheets of cold spray that drifted down into the canyon like frozen rain.
