The cold mountain wind howled across the limestone ridge of High-Arch. It whistled through the rock-cut crevices where six illegal stonework bypass drain tubes had tapped into the main channel of Saint Eleanor.
For three years, while forty thousand farmers in the lower valleys drank mud and watched their winter wheat shrivel into dust, these hidden water chutes had quietly siphoned off six hundred miners’ inches of pure alpine snowmelt. The diverted water had flowed underground through three-foot lead pipes, cascading down the private northern slopes of the mountain to fill the fancy swan lakes, marble glow pools, and terraced peach gardens of the Silver Tarns. The luxurious pleasure estates owned by Director Moros and his trade ring associates.
Today, thirty master masons, ditch-reeves, and quarrymen stood along the rocky ridge, armed with steel pry-bars, heavy cold chisels, pickaxes, and two pairs of sturdy draught oxen.
Tomas Reed climbed down into the narrow, damp trench of Shunt Number One, his cowhide boots sinking into six inches of wet limestone gravel.
His left forearm was cinched securely in its three-buckle calfskin brace, the stiff leather supporting the damaged radius against the jarring strain of manual digging. The cold mountain mist made the jagged white scar ache with deep, persistent stiffness. His left hand, robbed of thirty-five percent of its natural clamp-force, couldn’t swing a heavy two-handed sledge with equal balance. But Tomas understood the physics of stone and timber better than any clerk in the capital. He wedged a six-foot ash…
