The upper crest of the Grand Continental Diverter was three hundred paces wide and paved with granite slabs clamped together by lead-poured iron staples. In the biting north wind off the Inland Sea, the crest felt less like a town dam roof and more like the castle wall of a mountain castle under winter siege.
Tomas Reed stepped off the final oak rung of the western tramway, his iron heel-plates clicking on the wet stone.
Before him, stretching east into the dark, rose the twelve titan winch houses. Squat eight-sided towers of hammer-dressed dark rock capped with weathered copper roofs. From the cantilevered bronze gantries over the northern face, balance weight chains with links thick as a cart driver’s thigh dropped into the dark pool.
The Inland Sea stood higher than Tomas had ever seen in country survey charts—black, cold, and lapping within three feet of the low roof wall coping. Thin rafts of mountain ice and dead pines bumped against the underwater trash racks with hollow thuds.
The office headquarters, a two-story pavilion of slate and timber built against the western cliff, lay in ruins. Not from the tremor, but from greed and panic.
Tomas walked through the double oak doors, their forged hinges wrenched and split. The entry hall, where country water commissioners once sat to receive annual petitions, was littered with the debris of a routed guard post.
