With the water-pressure head pressure dropped by forty percent and the raging bypass channel venting eighty thousand cubic feet per second around the mountain, the pivot pin chamber of Pier Twelve was no longer a chamber of coming soon death.
The needle-thin jets of high-pressure water that had been shooting through the cut stone joints had subsided to gentle trickles. The stale, rotten-egg steam that had filled the vault had cleared, replaced by a cool, clean draft of autumn air drawn down through the open check hatch.
Tomas, Renn Tal, and Master Hal stood on the wooden walkway planks in the center of the vault. With them were twenty senior quarrymen and blacksmiths. It carried four massive hard dark metal-steel tie-rods, each four inches in width and twenty feet long, forged with heavy turnbuckles in the center.
Renn Tal knelt beside the fractured pivot pin with a brass wire brush, cleaning the gray river silt from the snapped metal.
“Look at the crystal-clear structure,” the old engineer said. He pointed with his cane to the exposed fracture face. “The inner twelve inches of the shaft snapped along the 110 crystal plane. It was held by less than an inch and a half of twisted metal when Tomas gave the drop command. If the bypass gate had been delayed by another five hundred heartbeats, the shaft would have parted fully.”
