The darkness inside the entry hall was total, thick as wet felt. He pressed against Len’s eyes until his nerves began to manufacture phantom sparkles of violet light.
Bram didn’t light his lantern right away. The former court guard stood with his back against the iron door. His breath was held in his chest, his head tilted upward toward the vaulted ceiling. For two long minutes, none of them moved. They listened to the building breathe.
Above them, on the second floor, a floorboard creaked with the slow, steady beat of a night watchman pacing his rounds across the office offices. A key rattled in an iron lock. A door opened and closed. Then came the scrape of a chair being dragged across pine boards and the dull, muffled thump of boots resting on a desk. The night clerk was settling in for his three-hour nap before the dawn bells.
Only then did Bram reach into his oilskin coat, produce a small brass dark-lantern fitted with four internal copper baffles, and strike a single phosphorus match beneath his sleeve.
The flame caught with a faint, rotten-egg hiss. Bram adjusted the sliding shutter until only a pencil-thin beam of green-tinted copper light emerged from the lens, aiming it down at the floorboards.
