The drop in water-pressure head pressure was not an abstract math on a drafting slate. It was a visible, physical receding of doom across thirty square miles of water.
Tomas walked the two miles of granite low roof wall from the western bypass overhead frame back to Pier Twelve. The rain had ceased, replaced by a cold, pale sunlight that broke through the leaden clouds, throwing long, golden shafts of light across the vast expanse of the Inland Sea.
Beside him walked Nessa Vale and Master Hal, their boots clicking rhythmically against the dry granite flat stone slabs. Every hundred paces, Nessa stopped to inspect the brass water-level markers carved into the upstream face of the coping stones.
“Fourteen inches down,” Nessa called out, her voice clear and steady in the quiet air. “The pool height has dropped fourteen inches in thirty minutes. The bypass channel is drawing off ninety thousand cubic feet per second. The inflow from the northern melt is fully balanced.”
When they reached Pier Seven, the change was miraculous.
The terrifying four-inch water jet that had punched through six feet of cut stone stonework at midnight—the breach that Tomas and Sile had shored with oak timbers and lead sheet—was no longer shooting forty feet across the lower terrace. The pressure behind the leak had collapsed. The roaring spout had dwindled to a sluggish, clear trickle of water that dribbled harmlessly down the face of the stone into the drainage deck drains.
