The inside of the pivot pin chamber beneath Pier Twelve felt less like a building vault and more like the inside of a fractured skull under world-size water pressure.
Tomas followed Renn Tal down the upright iron rung-ladder, his cart driver’s coat brushing against stonework walls that were slick with cold, black slime. Forty feet below the level of the upper narrow high walkway, the air was warm, stale, and thick with the heavy stench of sulfur, decomposing river weed, and hot, high-pressure metal.
Water didn’t trickle here. It atomized. Through three tiny hairline fissures in the six-foot granite cut stone blocks of the outer wall, high-pressure water jets were shooting across the stone floor in needle-thin streams. Where they struck the opposite stonework, they hissed like red-hot iron plunged into salt water, drilling neat, round holes through two inches of lime mortar.
“Keep your hands close to your ribs, boy!” Renn Tal shouted over the bone-shaking drumming of the chamber. “A pinhole jet at two hundred feet of head will take your finger off clean at the knuckle before you feel the cold!”
In the center of the vault sat the pivot pin housing. A huge casting of green-painted iron eight feet across, bolted into the solid mountain stone of the pier by twelve three-inch anchor bolts. Out of its circular hub protruded the fractured pivot shaft, four feet of solid forged hard dark metal-steel that carried the entire dead weight and water thrust of Sluice Twelve’s outward gate.
