Down along the Reed Bank canal berths, the freezing rain had turned the towpath into a dangerous slide of black peat. The Osprey—a sixty-foot clinker-built summer boat carrying one hundred and five recovered name deposits for the canal families—sat moored against the stone wall of Lock Four. Her broad hemp mooring lines were strained taut by the surging current.
Eren Moss, the gray-haired canal trustee, stood on the lock wall with a timber pike pole. His face was dark with panic. “A thirty-foot drift log from the upper timber mills has jammed crosswise beneath the lower lock gate!” Eren shouted to Tomas as he ran up the path. “The gate is wedged half-open! If we can’t drop the gate and flood the chamber, the low tide will ground the boat on the mud-bar. She will break her back when the river turns!”
Tomas bounded down the slimy granite steps of the lock pit. His boots splashed through three feet of swirling, muddy water. Beneath the massive oak leaf of the lower gate, a waterlogged hemlock trunk, two feet thick, was jammed solidly between the timber doorstep and the iron gate-shoe.
Nessa Vale leaped down beside him. She carried a heavy iron peavey hook and a two-inch manila hauling line. “We can’t saw it underwater!” Nessa shouted, wiping freezing spray from her eyes. “We have to roll the butt out of the shoe while the lock tender winches the gate!”
Tomas looked at the massive timber. It weighed at least twelve hundred pounds, wedged under forty tons of high-pressure water head. His injured left arm couldn’t lift forty pounds without tearing the knitting tendon. But the Osprey held the names of one hundred and five drowned children and mothers of Reed Bank.
Tomas reached out his good right hand, clasping Nessa’s wrist. “Nessa. Consent to the Carrier’s load.”
“Consented!” Nessa cried without pause.
Across Tomas’s field of vision, the Last Claim slate flared with brilliant amber light. LOAD SHARE ACTIVE · DURATION 10 MINUTES · WEIGHT DIVIDED EQUALLY.
A sudden, deep sensation of physical posture surged through Tomas’s chest and shoulders. The crushing, impossible dead-weight of the timber was not erased by magic. It was distributed with perfect exact balance across both their skeletal frames. Tomas hooked the iron peavey beneath the log, Nessa threw her full weight onto the lever, and together they heaved with a timed together, painful roar of effort.
With a sickening crunch of tearing bark and grinding gravel, the hemlock log rolled free of the gate-shoe. The rushing water caught the trunk, sweeping it through the open water chute into the lower river. Overhead, the heavy oak gate dropped into its stone recess with a thunderous boom that shook the canal walls.
Tomas collapsed onto the wet flat stone slabs. His breath burned in his throat, his heart pounding like a trip-hammer. The Load Share timer faded into darkness. Beside him, Nessa leaned against the wall, laughing through her gasps of tiredness.
As the shared skeletal posture dissolved, the ordinary, unforgiving physics of Tomas’s own body rushed back into his frame like cold water filling a trench. Inside the oiled calfskin brace and black wool sling, his left forearm throbbed with a fierce, needle-sharp heat where the muscles around the healing tendon had strained against the ash-wood splint during the ten-minute surge. He kept his back flat against the wet granite steps of the lock pit for a full minute, counting his breaths the way Gerva had taught him in the hill medicine room, opening and closing the fingers of his left hand inside his wet wool mitten until he was certain the stitched tendon still drew the thumb cleanly across the palm.
Above them on the lock wall, Eren Moss and two of his gray-bearded canal boatmen were already throwing their shoulders against the long oak balance-beam of the upper water gate paddles. With the lower gate seated squarely against its stone miter-doorstep now that the twelve-hundred-pound hemlock trunk was gone, the swirling brown race from the upper reach poured through the underwater under-road drain vents with a deep, rhythmic drumbeat.
“Throw us the bow-spring, Master Reed!” Eren shouted down through the freezing rain, coiling a fifty-foot hemp warping line around the cast-iron bollard at the head of Lock Four. “The chamber will top out in four minutes. The harbor-master’s patrol launch is coming down the North Cut with a chain-boom!”
Tomas pushed himself up from the slimy steps with his good right leg and right hand. He refused to let Nessa take his elbow until both of them stood on the broad stone coping at the lock’s edge. Two hundred yards up the straight canal cut, through the driving gray curtain of sleet, two yellow whale-oil lanterns bobbed low over the water—the town harbor-police barge, rowed by eight trade ring oarsmen who had not yet heard that Darven Holt was sitting in iron fetters at the Circuit Gaol.
“They have an iron drag-chain slung under their bow to foul the Osprey’s rudder-post before she clears the outer wing-wall,” Nessa panted. She wiped wet hair and river mud from her forehead as she snatched up her heavy iron peavey hook from the stones. “If they drop that chain across the lower lock apron while Eren is poling out, the ebb current will swing the hull broadside onto the stone groin.”
“They won’t reach the apron,” Tomas said, his voice rough from the hard effort of the lock pit as he unstrapped the waterproof canvas cover from the stern cargo box on the Osprey’s deck. Inside the box, lashed down in dry oat-chaff beside the one hundred and five bronze canisters of Reed Bank, lay the six massive forged-iron lock-wrenches that the Reed Bank boatmen had surrendered to the municipality thirty-nine years ago when their canal charter was suspended.
Tomas lifted the heaviest of the iron wrenches with his right hand and passed it across the rising gunwale to Eren Moss’s eldest nephew at the tiller. “Under the Canal Payback Writ signed by Advocate Quill, Lock Four reverts to the Reed Bank Navigation Trust the moment the hundred and fifth deposit crosses the doorstep,” Tomas called out clearly. He drew his pipe hub receipt pad and lead pencil from his oilskin breast pocket. “Once the Osprey clears the lower miter-gate, drop the upper paddle-boards and take the iron crank winch handles onboard with you. Without a crank winch wrench, that patrol launch will have to sit in the upper cut until the harbor-master walks to the Bond Court on foot.”
The swirling green water in the lock chamber leveled with the lower reach. Then, Eren Moss signed the waterproof parchment receipt against the wet timber of the balance-beam. It pressed his thumb beside the stamp of the Reed Bank boat registry. The two boatmen on the west wall threw their weight against the lower balance-beam. The massive oak leaves swung wide into their stone pockets, and six long ash setting-poles bit at the same time into the gravel bottom.
The sixty-foot clinker hull of the Osprey glided forward over the cleared stone doorstep without a scrape or a shudder. As her stern-post passed the outer stonework cheek, Eren’s nephew leaned over the taffrail, slipped the iron crank winch wrench off the upper paddle spindle. Then it swung the lower lock gate shut behind them with a trailing hemp check-line. That left the trade ring patrol barge trapped behind fourteen feet of dry granite drop.
Out in the canal, the lock chamber filled with swirling green water. The Osprey rose smoothly on the tide, her broad spritsail hoisted into the dawn wind. He carried her precious cargo into the safe reaches of the southern delta.