The bronze wood slot latch gave way with a dry, metal screech that tore through the dead silence of the hall. Bram Ash threw his shoulder against the oak. That forced the heavy fire-door inward against a draft of air so cold it felt like stepping into an open meat freezer.
Len raised his tin lantern, throwing the shutter wide.
The bitter salt fever ward was an unheated, stone-walled pavilion sixty paces long and twelve paces wide, originally built as an emergency overflow bunkhouse during the limestone quarry floods of Year Three. Its walls were raw yellow brick, weeping cold moisture that had frozen into crystal-clear rime along the lime mortar lines. Down the center of the hall ran two parallel rows of rusted iron hospital cots. Forty beds in total, each fitted with a thin straw pallet and a single coarse cotton blanket stamped with the blue three-cog seal of the Municipal Health Bureau.
There was no heat.
The cast-iron radiators along the north wall were silent, their copper supply unions cut, their release cocks frozen solid in crusts of yellow sulfur ice. Overhead, suspended from iron roof beams, six copper reflector lanterns hung dark and empty, their kerosene fonts dry, their wicks trimmed down to charred stubs.
