Eighteen minutes remained before the estuary tide crested the lower doorstep. The bronze cage in the center of the intake chamber was beginning to scream.
It wasn’t a human sound. It was the high, thin shriek of four tons of rusted bronze and cold iron shaking under total spark shear. With every metal tube removed from the core tier, the grounding circuit designed thirty-nine years before by Arch-Mage Renn Tal lost another fraction of its artificial flow pushback. The energy that had once held four million cubic feet of silt back from the turbine blades was backing up through the overhead power bars, seeking any path to earth through the wet solid mountain stone.
Blue arcing fire, thick as a man’s thumb, leaped from fine china insulator to insulator across the ceiling vault. The air tasted of sulfur, scorched wool, and ozone so sharp it burned the back of the throat.
“Canister seven hundred and ten!” Aven Lark shouted through the roar. His padded tongs were smoking, the hardened rubber around the jaws melting into black grease. His face was blackened with soot, but his hands held firm.
Mirelle Voss stood beneath him on the wet granite bench. She caught the copper metal tube as it dropped from the release tongs. She wrapped it instantly in a dry square of waxed linen. Her dark hair had come loose from its pins. It whipped across her cheeks in the violent drafts pulled down the air-flow shaft by the heat of the arcing coils.
“Deposited by Jonatan Moss, barge-builder of Reed Bank!” Mirelle proclaimed, her voice cutting through the hiss of discharging copper. “Received into lawful custody!”
She handed the warm metal tube down to Tomas Reed.
Tomas knelt in the mud beside the zinc-lined packing hampers. His boots were sunk in two inches of rising, freezing salt water that had begun to back up through the drainage cry-holes in the floor. The tide was turning. In less than a quarter of an hour, the estuary would flood the chamber neck-deep.
He took the metal tube with his right hand, slid it into its numbered zinc compartment. Then he pressed the beeswax cake into the rim. His left forearm burned with a deep, grinding throb. Inside the calfskin brace, the scarred tissue where the rusted blade had cut his muscle fibers felt as tight as a dried fiddle-string. Every time he pivoted to lift an eight-pound zinc canister, his left fingers twitched with cold numbness. He kept his left hand clamped flat against the lid of the hamper, using the rigid frame of the wooden crate to support his wrist. Meanwhile, his right arm did the heavy work of sealing and stamping.
“Seven hundred and eleven!” Aven called down.
A blinding flash of violet light lit the entire vault. A fine china insulator six feet above Aven’s head shattered with the crack of a pistol shot, spraying white glaze fragments across the mud. A thick snake of blue fire grounded directly into the central bronze power bar, causing the four-inch metal beam to sag and glow cherry-red in the gloom.
“The upper hanger is shearing!” Aven cried, stumbling back down the bronze ladder. “The heat is melting the solder joints! The whole overhead channel is coming down!”
Above them, thirty feet of four-inch bronze power bar—weighing more than six hundred pounds and carrying the leftover static discharge of forty years of captive current—groaned as its iron ceiling eye-bolts tore free from the wet limestone. The massive metal bar dipped like a falling tree, directly above the table where Mirelle was securing the master folios.
Tomas didn’t stop to calculate odds. He had carried heavy timber frames through narrow tenement doorways for nine years. He knew how falling weight behaved.
He lunged forward through the water, his boots throwing up sheets of gray spray. He didn’t try to catch the falling bronze with his hands. To touch that metal directly would have fried the nerves in his arms. Instead, he seized a six-foot baulk of seasoned spruce wooden props timber resting against the chamber wall. Clamping the rough wood beneath his right armpit and locking his hip against the bedrock footing, he drove the top of the timber upward like a pike.
The falling bronze power bar slammed into the spruce post with a bone-jarring crash.
The shock traveled straight down the wood into Tomas’s right shoulder. It drove his heels four inches into the mud and gravel. Sparks cascaded over his head in a hissing shower of gold and crimson. It scorched the wool of his tunic. His left arm, buckled against his chest, screamed in protest as the side-impact jarred his wounded forearm. But the calfskin brace held the tendon in place.
“Nessa! The parbuckle!” Tomas shouted over his shoulder.
Nessa Vale, who had been guarding the intake valve on the upper gallery, reacted instantly. She hurled a coil of heavy dry tarred hemp over the iron narrow high walkway railing, looping the bight around the glowing bronze channel. With three draymen throwing their weight onto the rope from the dry gallery above, they snubbed the falling metal two feet above the packing hampers.
Tomas kicked the spruce prop securely beneath the beam and stepped back, his chest heaving, his breath tearing in ragged gasps.
“Two canisters remain!” Mirelle said, stepping through the falling sparks without flinching. She looked at Aven. “Seven hundred and twelve. And the center.”
Aven climbed back onto the scorched lower framework. His tongs were ruined, but he wrapped his hands in three layers of dry wool sacking. He gripped the collar of canister seven hundred and twelve.
“Thomasin Cole, weaver of Willow Stair!” Mirelle spoke the name into the smoke.
The metal tube slipped free. Tomas caught it, dropped it into the zinc rack, and stamped the wax.
“Now the last,” Mirelle whispered.
At the very center of the bronze framework, mounted behind a circular plate of thick, leaded crystal, sat a single metal tube forged not of copper. But of cold-hammered iron. It bore no four-digit town number. Across its face, cut by a hand-graver thirty-nine years before, were five letters: V-O-S-S.
It was Oren Voss’s final deposit. The sworn statement he had carried to the North Water Gate before Darven Holt’s men drove an iron spear through his lungs. It was the master key that had been forced into the engine to lock the other seven hundred and twelve deposits into permanent servitude.
Mirelle stepped up to the crystal plate. She didn’t use tongs. She didn’t use sacking. She reached out with her bare, scarred fingers, her pale hands steady as stone. Then she grasped the cold iron metal tube.
The moment her flesh touched the metal, the violent blue arcing along the ceiling died.
The screeching whine of the framework dropped an octave, then two, sinking into a low, mournful hum that shook through the water around their boots. Across the surface of the iron metal tube, a faint golden light shone, warm and soft as autumn sunlight on an apple orchard.
Mirelle turned the metal tube forty-five degrees to the right.
With a soft, clear chime that sounded like a silver bell struck in an empty church, the iron metal tube released from its housing.
The silence that followed was huge.
The humming stopped fully. The glowing bronze power bars went dark and cold. High above in the air-flow chimney pipe, the wind shifted. That brought the clean, fresh smell of rain and wet willow leaves down into the depths of the pit.
Across Tomas’s inner vision, the Last Claim slate lit with a deep, triumphant deep ring. The sixth seal chimed, its golden letters etched into the dark parchment of his mind:
ALL SEVEN HUNDRED AND THIRTEEN LIVING DEPOSITS DISCHARGED FROM Town SERVITUDE. CHAIN OF CUSTODY RESTORED TO THE COMMON TRUST.
Down in the bypass channel outside the vault, a deep, rhythmic rush of water echoed through the rock. Renn Tal’s limestone spillway was running at full capacity. The River March was pouring down the terraced gravity basins, through the newly cleared western gorge, and out into the vast expanse of the south holding polders. The water level in the intake pit ceased to rise.
Fen Hollow was not flooded. Low Bellwether was dry. The great high-pressure engine of Darven Holt was nothing more than twelve tons of dead, cold bronze.
Tomas knelt in the mud, carefully securing Oren Voss’s iron metal tube into the center of the master receipt box. He closed the heavy pine lid, dropped the iron latch into place. Then he locked it with the brass key that hung from his neck.
Aven Lark sat down on an overturned wicker hamper, his face buried in his soot-stained hands. His shoulders shaking with was silent, tearless relief.
Mirelle stood beside Tomas, looking down at the locked chest. Her face was smudged with soot and river silt. But her eyes held a clarity that thirty-nine years of mourning had never been able to put out.
“It’s finished, Tomas,” she said softly.
Tomas stood up, wincing slightly as the breath flow returned to his stiff left hand. He unhitched his leather satchel, checked that the master manifest was dry. Then he looked up the iron ladder toward the gray circle of dawn light eighty feet above.
“The engine is finished, Mistress Voss,” Tomas replied, wiping the rain from his jaw. “Now we go to North Basin Lane and settle the account with the man who built it.”