The Lock-Keeper's Covenant
A Novel of Canals and Old Magic

About this book:

On the Blackwood Cut, the water doesn't flow—it waits. In the autumn of 1924, lock-keeper Thomas Vance tends a stretch of canal where the depth gauge measures not feet, but *hydraulic tension*, its needle drifting into a crimson arc marked only with Roman numerals. A veteran of Ypres, Thomas knows the routine: wind the paddles, gauge the levels, keep the coal boats moving. But the Cut remembers the strike of '88, the three men who drowned when the sluices failed, and the old bargemen's whispered warnings. When the water begins to hiss instead of roar, when offerings of iron and cloth surface from the culverts, and the needle climbs toward *III*, Thomas realizes his quiet gauge isn't monitoring the canal—it's monitoring a debt coming due.

Blending folk horror with the gritty poetry of Britain's working waterways, *The Lock-Keeper's Covenant* immerses you in a world where canals are veins of old magic, and every lock chamber is an altar. Thomas Vance is a protagonist carved from iron and exhaustion, his damaged knee clicking in time with something ancient stirring beneath the brickwork. The prose drips with atmosphere: the smell of cold iron and turned earth, the rhythm of horse-hooves on towpaths, the particular silence of a waterway that has stopped pretending to be mere water.

As the fog thickens and the gauge needle creeps toward numbers that have no business on a depth scale, Thomas must navigate bargemen's superstitions, canal company secrets, and a covenant older than the company itself. For readers who love the creeping dread of *The Willows*, the historical texture of *The Essex Serpent*, and the canal-side mysticism of *The Water Knife*, this is a novel where every turned windlass tightens the tension—and what rises from the deep has been waiting a very long time to collect.