Sister Osha backed three paces up the tunnel until she found a dry shelf wide enough for her heavy archive case. She unlatched the brass hasps, keeping the three copied memory stones wrapped safely in their padded cloth at the bottom, and lifted out her father’s small leather-bound field notes along with a thin bundle of temple survey sheets from the Stormglass district.
Ysabet came to stand beside her, pressing her left elbow lightly against her bruised ribs to steady them while she held her lamp over the page. Her right hand, with its two permanently bent outer fingers and the fresh pink burn-scar across the palm from the observatory, rested on the lid of the case to keep the paper flat.
“There’s an account from the old bath-quarry engineers,” Osha said, running her forefinger down a column of cramped brown ink. “When they cut the lower drainage tunnels sixty years ago, they hit warm breath-eel galleries choked with this same violet shelf-mold. They tried scraping it with wet cloths and lost four diggers to lung-rot within a week.”
“Did they leave the tunnel to choke?” Ashaun asked from the mouth of the basin, where she was watching Pip block a second sliding eel from a saucer of eggs.
