The granite didn’t tremble like earth shaken by horses. It shivered with a steady, high-hum that traveled up through the iron hobnails of Tomas Reed’s boots and settled into his shins.
He stood on the wet shale shelf three hundred paces below the western bridge pillar of the Grand Continental Diverter. The gorge was narrow, cut through dark stone by ice-slow drainage. But the wall before them was the work of mortal hands. It rose two hundred feet above the riverbed, an unbroken crescent of dressed gray cut stone stretching nearly half a mile from cliff to scarp. Behind that wall lay two hundred square miles of the Inland Sea, suspended above the river basin.
Below it, spreading south into the dusk, lay three provinces: the orchard plains of Oakhaven, the textile towns of West-Reach, and the peat basins of the Low Marches. Nearly half a million souls slept in timber cottages and river apartments within two days’ flood-run of the spillway doorstep.
“Listen,” Nessa Vale said.
She stood ten paces out on the slick raised stone road. Her oilskin coat buttoned was tight against the river wind. With her left hand, she held the silver sound tube against her neck. Its flared bell was pressed to the dark rock cliff. The hearing damage she had carried since the West Bridge disaster twelve years prior left her mostly deaf to high tones. But the silver horn acted as a clockwork guide-rod. She turned shakes into pulses against her mastoid bone.
