To determine whether any sound bearing ground remained beneath the cantilevered granite foundation of Pier Four, Tomas Reed and Sile Rook waded to the southern margin of the wash-out cave. There, the boiling pool shallowly overlapped a sloping shelf of river-bed silt. The underground vault was colder here, chilled by the ancient bedrock slow leak that trickled through the limestone seams. But the air remained stifling and rotten-egg.
The stench of sulfur and decomposing plant fiber was so thick that even the vinegar rags tied across their mouths couldn’t filter out the greasy, moldering taste of the underground air. Tomas took a broad, flat-bladed ditching spade from the leather sling at his back. He gripped the ash shaft with his sound right hand, his left forearm clamped within its buckled calfskin brace, resting against the spade’s cross-t-grip to guide the stroke. The permanent thirty-five percent grip loss from the old Bellwether scar meant he couldn’t squeeze the wood with full power. But his back and shoulder muscles had learned to compensate with a rhythmic, downward lunge that drove the steel blade through four inches of gray, greasy clay with every thrust.
Beside him, Sile Rook drove an eight-foot steel sounding bar deep into the silt bank, leaning his full two hundred pounds of bone and muscle against the iron T-handle.
