The downstream narrow high walkway of Pier Seven was a suspended shelf of riveted wrought-iron grating, two feet wide, clinging to the upright stonework face eighty feet above the foaming cooking pot of the spillway.
The wind here didn’t blow in gusts. It roared upward from the deep pit in a violent, freezing updraft, carrying sheets of crushed river spray that struck Tomas’s face like thrown gravel. Every breath tasted of cold moss, wet slate, and crushed granite. Below their boots, the dark void churned with white water, lit up only by the faint, sickle gleam of the moon breaking through the low autumn clouds.
Tomas moved along the narrow high walkway with his balance point pressed against the granite face.
His left hand, wrapped in the stiff calfskin wrist brace, gripped the cold iron guide cable that was pinned into the stonework by eye-bolts every ten paces. Across his chest, his porter harness was clipped to the safety line by a short length of tarred manila rope and a forged iron snap-shackle. Every five paces, he stopped. He used the heel of his boot to kick away thick cakes of hardened lime settled mud and slippery river weed that had piled up on the iron mesh. If an iron hobnail hit that wet slime at an angle, a man could skate sideways under the single handrail before his hands could close on the cable.
