The relay carriage that arrived at the lower raised stone road checkpoint at four in the morning was not a royal coach. It was a battered two-horse mail wagon from the southern turnpike, its yellow paint scoured down to the bare ash boards by road gravel, its draft horses lathered in white, foamy sweat that smelled of ammonia and wet leather.
The door swung open, and an old man stepped down into the gray river silt.
He was seventy-six years old, thin as a willow lath, wearing a threadbare gray woolen greatcoat with tarnished horn buttons. Around his neck hung a pair of brass drafting dividers on a greasy cord. Then he tucked under his arm was a heavy metal tube of black japanned tin. It was sealed with red lead at both ends. His left leg dragged slightly, the knee stiff from an old foundry accident forty years past, but his eyes. He peeked out from beneath the frayed brim of a beaver-felt hat, were as sharp and cold as freshly chipped flint.
Master Engineer Renn Tal had come back to the dam he had built.
Tomas Reed walked down the raised stone road to meet him, his boots squelching in the cold mud. Behind Tomas, the eastern sky was beginning to pale into a sickly slate gray, throwing the monstrous black dark shape of the Diverter into sharp relief against the horizon.
