The office pavilion was cold and smelled of stale ash, but on the great oak table, the master promise of the Grand Continental Diverter lay open like an unrolled battlefield.
Tomas Reed stood over the twelfth thick parchment leaf, his iron-gall inkpot uncapped, his unshaped goose quill gripped firmly in his right hand.
Through the arched windows overlooking the northern pool, the black water of the Inland Sea was rising. He could see the white foam lines creeping up the dressed cut stone blocks of the low roof wall. Two inches above the morning mark, exactly as Nessa’s stress charts had predicted.
The Diverter was not merely groaning now. It was shuddering. Every few seconds, a sharp, metal shaking ran through the floorboards. That made the brass inkpot rattle against the wood.
Sile Rook stepped through the doorway, with two men who didn’t wear the gray homespun of Bellwether.
The first was a massive, barrel-chested man with a beard the color of rusted wire, wearing a heavy split-cowhide logging apron and iron-toed boots caked with red clay—Master Gault, head wagon driver of the Oakhaven Timber Trade group. The second was leaner, with sharp, sun-darkened features, stone-cutter’s glasses pushed up onto his wool cap, and a heavy brass measuring tongs thrust through his belt—Master Hal, warden of the West-Reach Quarrymen’s Guild.
