The antechamber was twenty paces square, paved with massive slabs of blue-gray slate that had been chiseled flat seventy years ago by convict labor from the lower limestone quarries. The room had no fire bowls, no carpets, and no painted silk scrims. The only light came from a single, hooded tin lantern hanging from an iron ceiling hook. It cast a narrow pool of dull yellow light across the center flags. The corners of the room were lost in freezing, damp shadow that pooled around the baseboards like cold, clotted grease.
The air here was freezing, rushing in through the heavy oak double doors that led out onto the granite carriage terrace. The heat was ten degrees below that of the parlor, smelling of damp limestone, horse manure, wet wool. The sharp, metal tang of the scouring mountain wind that blew through the high crevices of the northern ridge.
Two watchmen in the gray woolen tunics of the Judge’s Guard stood beside the outer doors, their iron-shod axe-spears resting in floor rings bolted to the stonework. Their breath plumed in white, ragged clouds beneath their iron skullcaps. They didn’t move as Len and Bram entered. Their eyes were fixed on the far wall, their faces gray with cold and the sullen, deadened boredom of men who had spent eight hours standing on frozen stone in the dark. They were young men, barely older than Len, with the pinched nostrils and dry, rasping coughs of the lower wards.
