The Tide Organ of Caddow

About this book

In the delta city of Caddow, under two moons, the Tide Organ has forecast the sea for three hundred years, and for fifty-five of them Ysolde Marr has been its Listener: the woman chosen at eighteen to read its punched ribbons for the city. Now she is seventy-four, and a young Fens engineer named Teodor Hask has built a steam-driven Reckoner that he says can do her work without priests or ceremony. His machine names a date for the next Long Tide, the flood that comes once in a lifetime. Ysolde knows the date is wrong. To prove it she would have to explain how she knows, and that would mean opening a door she has kept shut since the night the sea last came. With the Fens quarter in the balance, the city's oldest machine and its newest must be made to agree before the moons do.