Four hours before the dawn low tide, the quiet of the underground vaults was shattered by three thunderous, rhythmic clangs that sent blast waves through the brickwork under-road drains. The great bronze escape bell atop the North Gate tower—the chime that signaled a coming soon dam breach and ordered all citizens to flee to the high hills—was ringing with frenzied, violent strokes.
In the staging yard beneath the monument, panic flared instantly. Forty volunteer wagon drivers dropped their ropes. Lightermen shouted warnings of incoming water, scrambling toward the narrow stone exit stairs in a blind rush to escape the underground tunnels.
Tomas Reed didn’t run. He grabbed his ash-wood pack frame with his right hand, drove his iron-shod boots into the slippery slime of the narrow high walkway. Then he lunged toward the brass float gauges mounted beside the intake water chute. Nessa Vale was already there, holding her bullseye lantern against the tuned gauge rod.
“The water isn’t rising!” Tomas roared, his voice cutting through the damp roar of the water gate like an iron chisel. “Look at the floats! The river is at eighteen feet three inches! It has dropped two inches in the last ten minutes! It’s a false bell! Stand your ground!”
Sile Rook charged to the foot of the exit stairs, his two-inch heartwood tall body-shield slamming against the granite archway with a booming impact that arrested the fleeing workers. “First man up these stairs answers to my hooked pruning blade!” Sile shouted, his scarred neck flushed crimson. “The water is behind stone gates! The bell is a trick to empty the yard!”
High up in the bell tower platform, a dark figure in a courier’s oilskin coat was wildly pulling the hemp alarm rope. Tomas dropped his satchel into Nessa’s hands and bounded up the iron spiral stairs three steps at a time. He ignored the searing agony that shot through his left forearm as he used his braced wrist to stabilize his ascent.
He reached the open belfry. Just then, the saboteur turned, a forged carpenter’s draw-knife gleaming in his fist. It was the surviving partner of Malk—the hired cutthroat who had escaped the spillpipe ambush. On the stone floor behind him lay the cut main charging cable of the archive coils, its braided copper strands frayed and sparking with dying static-electric fire.
The saboteur lunged, aiming a vicious thrust at Tomas’s throat. Tomas didn’t try to block with his injured left arm. He pivoted on his right heel, swung his heavy ash pack frame like a battering ram. Then he caught the man square in the chest bone. The impact drove the saboteur back against the stone railing, knocking the breath from his lungs and sending the knife clattering over the low roof wall into the black water fifty feet below.
Two watch sentries rushed the platform, pinning the gasping saboteur to the wet slate floor. Tomas knelt beside the cut cable, his chest heaving, his fingers trembling with hard effort. Aven Lark clambered up the stairs moments later, inspecting the cut copper channel with a sickened grimace.
Before the sentries hauled the bruised cutthroat down the spiral iron steps, Tomas reached into the inner breast pocket of the man’s courier oilskin with his right hand. His fingers closed around a brass eight-sided gate-pass and a folded slip of greased tracing paper stamped with the private household crest of High Bluff Terrace. Written in fresh lead pencil across the slip were three short lines. Cut the main copper feeder at the fourth hour, ring the breach triple-chime until the wagon drivers scatter, and drop the bronze clapper-pin down the drain shaft. Fifty crowns on delivery of the pin.
“Hold him in the stonework guard-box under double padlock,” Tomas told the watch corporal. He handed the brass gate-pass and the penciled slip down to Captain Wren’s runner at the landing. “Don’t take him to the High Ward lockup where Holt’s court guards can sign him out on a recognizance bond. Keep him on bread and boiled well-water until Hester Quill takes his settling before the bond court.”
Above them, the massive four-ton bronze bell was still humming in its oak yoke, the leftover shaking tingling through the soles of Tomas’s boots. If the wind shifted or a stray rope-end fouled the wheel, a single extra stroke would send the lower streets into a fresh stampede and jam the narrow canal bridges with fleeing hand-carts. Just then, the community wagons needed the road.
“Jory!” Tomas called down the stairwell. The young apprentice scrambled up onto the wet slate platform with his tool-bag slung over his shoulder. Then, Tomas pointed to the bell’s iron clapper-tongue. “Take the two-inch hemp lashing from my pack frame and bind the tongue fast to the eastern oak upright. Then pull the greased sheepskin muffler-hood over the lip of the bronze so it can’t ring even if someone fires a musket ball into it from the roofs.”
While Jory climbed onto the cross-timber and lashed the heavy iron tongue immobile with triple figure-eight knots, Aven Lark knelt beside the cut charging channel with a pair of bone-handled pliers and a pocket voltmeter. The old artificer’s knuckles were gray with cold as he pressed the brass contact needles against the frayed copper core. A weak, sputtering spark of violet light jumped between the tips. It smelled sharply of scorched gutta-percha and wet sulfur.
“Look at the needle on the dial, porter,” Aven muttered. He tapped the cracked glass face of the instrument. “The upper dynamo in the gatehouse is fully dead—he hacked clean through the lead-sheathed return line with a cold chisel before he started on the bell rope. All we have left is the leftover capacitance stored inside the liquid silver bath itself. Every time we ground a canister down in the vault, the voltage across the leftover rings drops by half a volt.”
Tomas rested his aching left forearm against the top of his wool sling. He felt the hot, rhythmic pulse where the violent swing of his pack frame had wrenched the healing radius scar. Down in the underground yard, Sile Rook and Nessa Vale had already marshaled the forty wagon drivers back to their hand-barrows. Their lanterns formed a steady, disciplined ring around the open vault hatch.
“What happens if we try to pull the lower tiers out of set to save the oldest plates first?” Tomas asked, his eyes fixed on the dying blue glow leaking up through the floor grating.
“If you pull Tier Four before Tier One is empty, the uneven magnetic load will tip the liquid silver column and short the whole frame in ten seconds,” Aven answered, snapping his leather instrument case shut. “We have to strip the rings from the top down, row by row, without dropping a single pair of tongs or pausing to rest the crew. Once we start the first twist on Bay A, nobody leaves the floor until the seven hundred and thirteenth plate is out of the bath.”
Tomas took a piece of white chalk from his coat pocket with his right hand and marked the exact hour—four-fifteen before dawn—directly across the stone top door beam of the belfry door so every watchman changing guard would see the countdown. Below them in the mist, the forty wagon drivers had finished re-lashing the tarpaulins to the community hampers, their silence steadier and far more dangerous to Darven Holt than the panic that had preceded it.
“The main charging line is cut through,” Aven whispered. His hands shook as he touched the cold metal. “The pool coils will hold their static-electric mid-air for exactly six hours. There’s no second chance, Tomas. We have only one transfer pass leftover. If we don’t uncouple all seven hundred and thirteen plates before the charge dies, the leftover deposits will dissolve into dead bronze forever.”