Tan lowered an empty barrel into the river before she let anyone near the counterweight.
The rope took its weight.
The bank pulley turned smoothly.
Joss set his good hand against the receiver strap and felt the temporary support stay square.
“Again,” Tan said.
They raised the barrel, filled it with wet stones, and lowered it a second time.
One pulley mount shifted.
She made the dock workers reset it farther from the broken pier.
By the time she was satisfied, low tide had exposed a strip of slippery masonry beneath the span.
Lantern light showed the counterweight shoe beyond it, lying sideways in three feet of water.
The tide wouldn’t leave it uncovered long.
Nera sat above them beside the frame.
Her remaining leg was wrapped in a fresh dressing, and she had finally accepted a blanket over both knees.
“Two eyes,” she called.
“Use both.
Pulling on one will turn it into the pier.”
Joss studied the shoe.
It looked like an iron boot big enough for a door.
Two attachment rings projected from its upper edge.
A bent pin hung beside one of them.
Tan tied a safety rope around her waist.
“I can go,” Joss said.
She showed him his stitched palm.
“You can supervise.
Keep that above water.”
He wanted to argue, mostly because supervision gave him time to think about what might go wrong.
She descended the ladder before he found a useful objection.
Latch followed her to the lower platform.
It gripped a timber with all four feet, keeping the rope tail away from the water.
Pip had asked to come; Tan had given him the more important task of counting lanterns on dry ground.
He remained above with Edda.
Joss fed rope through the bank pulley while Tan worked in the shallows.
She crouched, disappeared to the shoulders, then raised the first loop through a ring.
“One seated.”
He took up slack.
The shoe didn’t move.
She waded around it for the other ring.
Below her, a row of submerged stones turned.
Joss saw the pale edges shift through the water.
They formed a channel leading from the old bridge footing toward her boots.
“Tan.
Behind you.”
She climbed onto the shoe instead of looking first.
A stone rose where her ankle had been.
It knocked against the iron with a sharp scrape.
The river churned along the newly opened channel.
Something longer than a man’s leg moved beneath its surface, made of jointed stone and iron scraps that had belonged to the pier.
Joss couldn’t tell where the road ended and the thing began.
At the depot, it had followed the cart ruts.
Here it followed the loaded support scar.
Tan stood on the shoe with the second rope loop in her hand.
“I need another foot of slack.”
“It will come around you.”
“Then give me the foot before it does.”
He fed it carefully.
She put the loop through the second ring and pulled the knot tight with her teeth.
The stone seam struck the shoe again.
One lantern went out under a splash.
Joss called to the workers on the bank.
“Take both tails.
Even pull.”
They began hauling.
The shoe rose an inch, then wedged against a broken pier block.
The submerged seam pressed into the gap beneath it.
Tan jumped toward the ladder.
The lower platform cracked.
Her safety rope caught her at the waist.
Latch held the tail against the timber, but the timber itself tilted into the river.
Joss drew her line around his pulley post.
The sound mount took her weight while he pulled with his right hand.
She found a rung and climbed clear, coughing water.
Latch remained on the collapsing timber.
“Let go,” Joss said.
Its lid opened.
Its feet didn’t.
The rope under one foot was their lifting line.
If it let the timber turn, that line would scrape across the broken block and part.
Joss looked at the test barrel floating beside the platform.
They had kept the wet stones inside it.
He could give the seam a different moving weight to follow.
“Leave the shoe still,” he told the hauling crew.
“Bren, barrel line.
Across the channel.”
Bren had insisted on helping despite his shoulder.
Joss gave him a light rope job rather than a hauling tail.
He pulled the test barrel downstream, keeping its bottom scraping the old masonry scar.
The submerged stones followed it.
Joss didn’t need them to chase far.
He needed three clear feet around the shoe.
Tan reached Latch from the ladder, took its living body under the iron edges, and lifted.
It released the rope only after she looped it around a sound rung.
The barrel hit the seam.
Its lower staves split.
Wet stones spilled into the moving channel, slowing it with its own chosen load.
“Now,” Joss called.
The bank crew hauled.
He steadied the frame through its touched strap while the receiver half took the pull into stone.
Its needle rose to seventy-three.
He didn’t ask it for more.
Tan levered the shoe clear of the broken block with her hammer handle.
The iron boot came up.
It hung between its two ropes, dripping river mud onto the platform.
The seam returned toward it, but the workers had already swung it beyond the water’s edge.
Joss helped lower it into the receiver notch.
Nera guided the last turn from above.
Iron met iron with a deep, satisfying knock.
The frame’s red footing mark turned amber.
Sixty-two.
Across the bridge, three more planks formed.
They stayed.
For a moment, even the river seemed quieter.
Tan sat on the lower stair, shivering.
Latch settled beside her boots with water streaming from its joints.
Joss tucked the blanket from his cart around her shoulders.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Hot food next.”
“That I can afford on credit.”
While the others checked the new footing, he examined the bent pin recovered with the shoe.
Its long shaft had been filed nearly through.
The break was smooth on three sides and jagged only at the end.
This support hadn’t failed under ordinary use.
Nera saw it and closed her fingers over the blanket.
“Keep that with the docket,” she said.
Joss put it in his coat.
His collection of mistakes now included somebody else’s deliberate work.
Sella brought hot broth down the stairs.
She put the first bowl in Tan’s hands and held the next one until Joss stopped examining the pin.
“A crossing,” she said, looking at the returned planks.
“I’ve got work tomorrow.”
Her thumb pressed into the bowl’s rim.
Joss drank, watching two neighbors carry an empty medicine basket across one at a time.
The restored footing had already made somebody’s next hour easier.
He wanted to keep that thought beside the filed pin, where it could weigh against whatever answer he gave the man waiting above.
At the upper landing, Tovin waited with two men.
His bandaged wrist rested against his chest.
He stayed well clear of Latch.
“Twenty marks,” he said.
“A pass to the west gate.
A new cart.
You leave before dawn, and you leave the parcel here.”
Joss looked past him at Edda counting workers into the cookhouse, at Nera examining the shoe, at the plank Sella had crossed twice to prove it held.
“Who receives it?”
“You won’t need to worry about that.”
Tovin set a small purse on the landing stone.
Twenty marks made a heavier sound than Joss remembered.
“You wanted a route of your own.
This one is eating you.
Take a road that goes somewhere.”
The west gate meant the Blue Scar.
It meant the direction Bess had vanished.
Joss didn’t touch the purse.
He picked up the filed pin instead.