The descent into the drain tube well of Station Three was a painful test of one-armed cart hauling.
Tomas knotted the forty-foot tarred manila rope beneath his armpits, with Sile Rook anchoring the bitter end around the granite mooring bollard on the terrace. Tomas used only his sound right hand and his hobnailed boots to walk down the slimy iron rungs of the upkeep ladder. He lowered himself into the upright shaft.
The air inside the well was freezing, smelling of ancient bog mud, rotten-egg slime, and wet green rust. At the bottom, five feet below the terrace floor, Tomas’s boots sank into eight inches of soft, anaerobic silt.
The water in the well had drained through a cracked bottom valve, leaving the clockwork recording rig exposed.
Mounted upon a heavy granite ledge-stone four feet above the silt was the recording station of Eska Dorn. It consisted of a cast-iron mounting bracket supporting a massive tube-shaped housing of heavy sheet brass, two feet long and fourteen inches in width, fastened with eight heavy brass wing-nuts.
Protruding from the bottom of the housing was the clockwork float arm. A hollow brass metal tube twelve inches in width, counterweighted with lead discs, that had floated upon the surface of the drain tube water forty years before.
Tomas wiped the thick layer of green rust and sulfur crust from the brass faceplate with his leather gauntlet. Beneath the grime, stamped into the metal with the town seal of Bellwether, was the stone carving:
Town WATER CORPS · RECORDING GAUGE NO. 3
CALIBRATED & Approved: YEAR 441 · BELA TERN, MASTER
Across the seam of the brass lid, the original check seals remained. Two heavy lead wafers stamped with Sluice-Keeper Eska Dorn’s personal mark, unbroken and undisturbed by thirty-nine winters of darkness.
Tomas took his cold chisel in his right hand, set the point behind the iron mounting pins. Then he struck three deliberate blows with his mason’s hammer, using his right thigh to brace the tool.
With a sharp, metal ring, the mounting pins snapped off. Tomas caught the thirty-pound brass assembly in the crook of his right arm. He pressed it tight against his ribs to protect his braced left forearm.
He clipped his rope carter-hook through the bronze lifting eye on the housing.
“Haul away, Sile!” Tomas shouted up the shaft.
Above, the rope tightened. Sile Rook and Nessa hauled with rhythmic, patient strain. She lifted the heavy brass instrument toward the terrace. Tomas climbed the iron ladder behind it. His right hand gripped each rung with desperate, white-knuckled intensity.
Tomas hauled himself over the well low roof wall onto the terrace. Then, Nessa was already kneeling over the recovered gauge.
Tomas sank down onto the stone, cradling his braced arm against his chest. He reached out with his right hand. He laid his calloused palm upon the cold, green-crusted brass of the housing, and activated *Trace the Link*.
A sharp, electric pulse of amber light flared across his vision. It spread through the brass metal like veins of liquid gold.
The ability didn’t show him a magical vision. It revealed the careful custody chain. The physical touch of human hands that had interacted with this specific machine:
He saw the recorded imprint of Master Bela Tern’s bone measuring tongs tightening the brass fine-tuning screw in Year 441. He saw the firm, steady fingers of Sluice-Keeper Eska Dorn winding the eight-day clockwork drum at five in the morning on the flood day. And he saw the violent, clumsy impact of an iron pry-bar striking the external float linkage at nine-thirty that morning. That forced the needle upward.
The chain of custody was complete, unbroken, and exactly approved.
“The internal seals are intact,” Tomas breathed, his voice hoarse with fatigue. “The stamped copper graph tape is still inside the drum. The river didn’t drown this measure, Nessa. It was murdered.”
Before lifting the brass assembly from the terrace stones into the skiff, Nessa knelt with her boxwood measuring tongs and a soft badger-hair brush to document the physical state of the housing right away upon emergence from the well. She measured the exact thickness of the green rust deposit across Eska Dorn’s two lead check wafers, noting in her field register that the crystal-clear copper-carbonate crust spanned continuously across both the lead stamp and the adjoining brass pipe rim. Proof that the casing had never been opened since it sunk in the autumn of forty-two. On the lower bronze linkage arm where Trace the Link had revealed the blow of the saboteur’s pry-bar, she found a fresh-looking crescent scar beneath the black sulfur mud where an iron wedge had been driven between the stop-collar and the guide bracket to jam the float rod at its highest excursion.
With his sound right hand, Tomas reached into the canvas salvage pouch at his hip. Then he drew out the cast-iron mounting pins he had snapped from the well ledge-stone. He wrapped them in a square of greased burlap alongside a fistful of the gray high-pressure mortar from the shaft wall. Even with his left forearm throbbing inside its rigid cedar splints and the figure-eight webbing biting into his elbow crease, he didn’t neglect the backup physical exhibits needed for a Court of Claims filing. If Registrar Marr or Captain Holt’s advocates tried to claim the gauge had been made in a South Ward clock-shop, the matching fracture planes of the snapped iron pins would lock the instrument to the stonework ledge-stone of Station Three beyond any legal cavil.
Sile Rook leaned his sound right hip against the low roof wall coping. It used his teeth and his right hand to tighten the vinegar-soaked linen sling supporting his burned left arm before the six-mile pole back to Fen Hollow. The old watchman’s face was drawn and gray beneath a sheen of cold sweat. Even so, he insisted on checking the copper nails along the skiff’s starboard waterline where Dren’s flatboat had bumped the zinc sheathing during the ambush. Satisfied that the oak planking had taken no leak, he coiled the forty-foot tarred hoist-line into the bow tub and laid his eight-foot hooked pruning blade across the thwarts with the hooked steel blade facing the stern in case the surviving mercenary had rallied another patrol along the outer reed beds.
To keep the acid-burning marsh mist from attacking the freshly exposed brass threads of the float gauge during the return voyage, Tomas and Nessa coated the entire outside of the fourteen-inch metal tube in a thick jacket of sheep fat from the boat’s grease-bucket, then laced it inside a double envelope of tarred sailcloth. Neither Tomas nor Sile had two sound arms for heavy lifting. Because of that, they rigged a short parbuckle sling from the spare hemp cord and rolled the thirty-pound metal tube smoothly down the granite landing steps onto a bed of folded horse-blankets in the middle of the skiff’s floorboards, wedging it between the oak ribs with two cedar chocks so the roll of the wake couldn’t jar the delicate clockwork drum inside.
They loaded the thirty-pound brass gauge into the center of the zinc skiff. They wrapped it in dry horse-blankets alongside Tomas’s pack.
Sile Rook took the stern sweep with his uninjured right hand. He pushed the skiff away from the ruined stone platform into the yellow sulfur fog.
The journey out of the Black Marsh was silent. The rain had ceased, replaced by a bitter, biting north wind that promised winter. But in the belly of the oak skiff, the cold brass gauge lay secure—the fourth piece of freight returning to the city that tried to bury it.