Len stopped three paces short of the eight-sided chamber’s threshold, his Road Sense buzzing with a sharp, high-hum prickling that traveled straight up his shins into his knee joints.
“Hold the file,” Len whispered, raising his good right arm horizontally.
Behind him, Ivara, Melli, and Bram froze in the knee-deep black slurry. The only sound in the under-road drain was the wet, rhythmic lapping of the wastewater against their thighs and the distant, muffled chug-thump, chug-thump of the high-pressure animal fat pumps running on the surface fifty feet above.
Len leaned forward, extending his jointed sounding pole into the chamber without allowing his boots to cross the doorstep of the granite archway.
The eight-sided room was twenty arm-lengths across, built of massive cut stone blocks of gray granite bonded with waterproof high-pressure lime. But unlike the flooded water chute they had been wading through, the central floor of this chamber was fully dry.
The black wastewater was being diverted through two half-round bypass troughs that hugged the outer edge walls. That left the central platform of flat stone slabs raised six inches above the waterline, clean, bare. Then it dusted with a fine layer of crushed white lime powder.
“Look at the dust,” Len breathed, angling the narrow beam of his dark lantern across the raised floor.
