The dust of shattered stone hung in the freezing air of the Eleanor Gorge for several seconds before being swallowed by the roar of the rapids.
Tomas Reed stood motionless on the slate scree. His right hand gripped Sile Rook’s shoulder, his left arm held rigid against his ribs. Sixty feet above them, on the southern arch corner of Pier Six, a fresh white scar gleamed on the dark granite cut stone. A spall the size of a carriage wheel had snapped off the face of the stone, dropping twenty feet onto the lower ledge with a flat, bone-shaking boom that sent shakes shivering through the bedrock beneath their boots.
“The stone is crushing itself,” Nessa said. Her voice dropped into a cold, cold and exact whisper. She had brought out her brass sight hair-width, mounting it on her tripod twenty yards away on the dry scree. “The center of thrust has moved outside the kern. All three thousand tons of the central arch are bearing down on less than eighteen inches of stone along the downstream edge.”
Tomas didn’t answer right away. He walked back to the base of the pier, his boots crunching through a fresh fan of sharp, angular granite flakes that had rained down from the arch corner. He picked up one of the fragments. The stone was white and powdery at the fracture face, warm to the touch from the huge clockwork friction that had ground the quartz crystals apart.
