The walk from Ness Harth's fence down to Lock Three is a mile and a quarter of towpath. Twenty minutes of working light were left when the second shock arrived, and the sun was already in the canal trees. The stones on the towpath had jumped their sand. A pony had to look before putting weight on one.
The saddle map is the Neck Board's visitor sheet, folded twice and stamped for the season. It shows Lock Three, a future viewing platform, and a picnic grove with a small fork drawn beside the trees. Harth's sheet has the seam in pencil from a spring he spent on the bank. The Board declined to stamp the pencil. The stamped copies went out with the boats.
Kelp Neck is a strip of clay between the Gray Salt and the Stillwater. The Reed Cut is the trench barges take across it. The Neck Board keeps the locks, the fees, and the notices.
The first shock came at 4:12. It walked the water out of the chamber and set it back a hand high on the west wall. Cobb Harlan was on the wheel, turning a barge that should have cleared the lock an hour earlier. The wheel stayed in its socket. Harlan came off the catwalk onto the stone, and the stone shifted under him a second later.
The second shock came at 4:41, under the grove. Tables went into the cut. One floated a short way with the cloth still clipped, took on water, and went under with the forks in their tin. A section of catwalk folded along the bolts. The day group, the lock crews, and two barge families were moving by then. Arrows the Board had planted pointed them onto the scenic shelf above the towpath. The shelf cracked on the fifth aftershock and dropped a lip of sod into the reeds. Harth took them up the towpath to the hardwood and put them behind his woodpile, on the ground that has held his posts.
He counted seven aftershocks by full dark. Each one came as a shove through the soles, a wait, and another shove. The Neck Board's form has three lines for aftershocks. The clerk filled the three lines and stopped.
"It'll keep shoving until the clay's done with it," Harth said. He was stacking a woodpile that had walked a foot toward the cut. "I told them about the seam in the spring. They drew a table."
Harlan sat against the fence with the right foreleg out straight. Bramble Stitch, who keeps the ridge kits, had cut away the first splint, a peeled stake and a strip of his vest tied on by a barge hand. She bound the leg from the kit.
"Wheel's fine," he said. "I'll get on it when the leg says I can. They were driving the bounty nail while I was still on the stone. I heard it. Somepony was calling the number before they called up to see who was under the catwalk."
The number on the notice is 400 bits, for the head of what the sheet names a Neck Wyrm. The paper went on the lock post between the shocks. The first nail jumped at 4:41 and the sheet landed in the damp. A clerk nailed it again at dusk with two nails and a strip of tin.
Wellborn Quest stood at the post for that second nailing, in a skiff, in eight inches of water that had left the canal. The card said 80 bits an hour and wanted a signature before he stepped off. He asked which way the wyrm had fled. His hooves stayed in the skiff.
Harth has seen the animal four times in twelve years. It is a clay pig about the length of a cart tongue. When the bank works, the pig pushes a ridge of spoil out, eats the reed root turned up in the mud, and backs into the hole. It smells of wet iron. It pulled a fence post once, gnawed the end, and left the post in the reeds. Harth came back down at dusk and told Quest the animal had gone into the bank and the bank was still moving. Quest wrote "heading unconfirmed" on the card.
Copper Gauge came down between the shocks with a tape, measured the grove opening against the platform width, and asked Harth to hold zero on the far lip. The far lip was water. He wrote "access limited" and took the afternoon boat.
The ridge stayed full after dark. Foals slept in Harth's shed. The Neck Board left the morning visitor run locked, and Iron Press sent it through with the grove and the fork still on the plate. Cobb Harlan was on the third line of the injured list, under nonessential staff.
