The north chimney pipe gallery was an unlit stonework hall four paces wide, arched in heavy rough-faced granite blocks that had been scorched black during the first sky shield activations twelve years ago.
Len backed through the narrow entrance. His boots felt for the unmortared slate flags with the tactile sensitivity of his Road Sense. He held his shuttered copper safety lantern at hip height in his good right hand, the green-tinted beam trimmed to a narrow slit three inches wide. He cast a sharp-angled wedge of emerald light across the wet stone floor. The lantern was not an ordinary tin candle. Its housing was made from quarter-inch rolled copper plate, fitted with a curved reflector that packed the beam into a defined sharp-angled outer edge.
In Rookvale, copper light was not merely light. A double, showed up from the claimant cabinets through nonstop lines of unlisted shadow, couldn’t cross a focused copper beam without experiencing severe nearby cellular blistering and moving desynchronization. The metal didn’t destroy the manifestation, but it disrupted the field that held its stolen mass in clear three-space-folding form.
In his right palm, gripped alongside the lantern’s wire handle, was the five-inch Swedish carbon steel sheath knife.
