Eren Tal drove the second ash rung into the notched upright with two clean strokes of his wooden mallet, the dense grain of the heartwood answering with a sharp, dry tock that echoed off the damp limestone walls of the cellar. The washroom cellar smelled of boiled animal fat, wet sawdust, and the sour yeast of the kitchen above. On the workbench—a thick oak slab salvaged from an old ferry rudder—three ten-foot ladders lay side by side. Their stringers were bound with tarred marline at every joint. Eren wiped sweat from his jaw with a rolled sleeve of raw, unwhitened linen, his thumbs checking the flush edge of the wood slot. A ladder in an open ditch could flex and creak without killing a man. But thirty feet down an upright stone vent slicked with boiling algae, a soft rung meant an open compound fracture.
He reached into a wooden tub of rendered sheep fat, scooping up a walnut-sized lump of yellow grease with two fingers. Step by step, he rubbed the fat into the end-grain of the tenons, working the grease deep into the porous fibers to keep the wood from swelling shut. Just then, the underground steam hit it. Beside the bench, Tavi was unwinding coils of three-ply hemp rope, checking each fathom for rot by twisting the strands open under a smoky oil lamp. The boy’s forehead was smudged with soot. He moved with the jittery speed of someone who had slept four hours on a flour sack.
‘The rope’s good, Eren,’ Tavi said, holding up a section between his grease-stained thumbs. ‘No black mold in the core, and the animal fat dip is still waxy. But Sister Merrow says if we go down into that hole, we ought to tie canaries to our belts like the coal-heavers up at High Tor.’
‘We don’t have canaries, Tavi,’ Eren said without looking up from his wooden peg. ‘And a bird doesn’t tell you the air is bad until it’s already dropping off its perch. We carry animal fat rushlights. You watch the flame. If the yellow shrinks down to a blue button, you pull the safety line twice and you climb until your boots hit the floorboards. You don’t pause to gather your tools, and you don’t look back to see if Pella is carrying her satchel. You just climb. Understood?’
‘Understood,’ the boy whispered, swallowing hard as he knotted an iron carabiner to the lead line.
Pella came down the cellar steps carrying two zinc lanterns and a basket of boiled beet greens and salt pork that Merrow had insisted they eat before touching a rope. Her green tunic was stiff with dried silt. Her hair was tied back in a severe, no-nonsense knot secured with a bone awl. She set the lanterns on the brick floor and knelt right away before the small brass-bound pipe hub mounted beside the old cold-water barrel. The dial gauge Ada Morland had helped seat into the ancient pipe lead was ticking with a rapid, irregular rhythm. The little brass needle quivering like a trapped beetle behind its scratched glass face.
‘How does the line sound?’ Eren asked, setting down his mallet and reaching for a strip of dried pork.
‘It isn’t sounding right,’ Pella answered, her fingers resting lightly on the cold brass casing. She closed her eyes for three seconds, attuning her hearing to the pause between pulses. ‘There’s a bubbling blast chatter three deep-water lengths down. Water moving too fast through a squeezed tight throat. Listen to the interval. Thump... Hiss... Thump. It isn’t river flow. River flow has a low, muddy draw that drags like a wool blanket. This has an iron bite. It’s mechanically driven.’
She took a brass key from her apron and tapped the side of the lead pipe three times. She listened with her forehead pressed against the cold metal. The echo that returned was sharp and hollow. It shook with a high-pitched ring that set her back teeth on edge. ‘There’s an air pocket trapped behind the elbow,’ she muttered. ‘Ada warned us about this. If the college drain tube dumps hot water into a cold line without venting the head, the air compresses into an elastic spring. The moment a valve shifts, that air hammer will blow a lead joint out like wet paper.’
She drew out the chalk slate, her grease pencil hovering over the white grid. The small brass arch on the bench hummed faintly. Then, the letters etched themselves across the display with a dry, clockwork rasp.
Eren stopped chewing. His eyes fixed on the sixth line. ‘Fifty-five PSI? That’s double what Ada said the lead sleeves could endure. The baked-clay trunks in the deep gallery were laid down in the second century after the Great Confluence. They were fired clay, Pella, glazed on the inside with salt-ash. They aren’t forged iron boiler plates. At fifty-five pounds, the pipe bell joints will spit their oakum like melon seeds.’
‘The blow-off on the boat ramp gave it some relief,’ Pella said, standing up and dusting her knees. ‘That fissure outside is acting as a chimney. If it wasn’t venting steam onto the cobblestones, the gallery beneath our feet would have buckled at dawn. But the leak is widening. If the clay trunks shatter all at once under thirty feet of earth, the river head will punch right through the larder floor. The whole kitchen will drop into the cellar before the morning bread is out of the oven.’
Sister Merrow appeared at the top of the cellar stairs, her dark shape filling the narrow timber frame. In her right hand she carried her stout ash cane. In her left, a basket filled with rolls of clean boiled linen, two clay pot jars of vinegar wash. A heavy iron bone-saw wrapped in an oilskin cloth. She dropped slowly, her scarred knee catching on each riser with a deliberate, rhythmic scuff.
‘You aren’t going down alone,’ Merrow stated. It was a commander’s ruling, not an invitation for discussion. ‘Tavi stays at the top of the hatch with the relay bell. If I hear the line chime three times, I’m hoisting with the block and tackle. I’ve pulled twelve soldiers out of sapper tunnels in the Gray Marches. They all smelled of sulfur before they stopped breathing. Nobody plays the heroic martyr on an empty stomach.’
She set her medical basket on the bench beside Eren’s ladders. She reached into her pocket and produced three thick slabs of dense sourdough rye, crusted with caraway seeds and heavily smeared with cold bacon lard. ‘Eat. Every crumb. You’ll be breathing steam and sulfur down there. The grease coats the throat-pipe and keeps the lime dust from biting the throat. Don’t chew fast. Work the crust until it softens.’
Pella took the bread, biting into the tough, flour-dusted crust. The lard was salty, cold against the tongue. But as she chewed, her stomach stopped its nervous fluttering. Eren took his piece with a nod, chewing with rhythmic, clockwork steady strokes. Meanwhile, his hands tested the tension on the third ladder’s hemp lashing. ‘What about the town charter, Merrow? If the College court guards come sniffing around the porch while we’re down the hole, what keeps them from dropping a padlock on the cellar hatch?’
‘A padlock needs a legal warrant signed by two aldermen,’ Merrow said, her eyes narrowing. She watched Tavi test the relay bell. ‘Town elder Vesk won’t sign a warrant for Sorell without three committee hearings, and the court guards are too lazy to break an oak door before their morning ale. We have two hours of quiet. Use them.’
She looked at Pella with flat, dark scrutiny. ‘Your father had twenty-two men with him on the Third Gate when the flood took the weir, Pella. He stayed on the winch. That was because he thought the college would send the relief crew if he just held the chain ten minutes longer. The relief crew was sitting in the high council room having sweet almond buns while the water rose. Don’t you die for an institution that wouldn’t spend forty copper bits to buy you a new apron.’
‘I’m not dying for the College, Sister,’ Pella said quietly. Her voice had no tremor in it. She picked up the lead lantern, checking the wick’s trim. ‘I’m going down because if those pipes split, this house goes into the silt, and my father’s name stays on the dead-debt roll in the archives. We have three ladders, twenty deep-water lengths of tarred line, and two hours before the morning tide peaks. Let’s open the hatch.’
Eren picked up his pry-bar. At the rear of the washroom cellar, half-buried behind ten sacks of winter parsnips, lay a massive square flat stone slab banded in rusted forged iron. A recessed ring bolt sat flush in the center, coated in green rust. Eren cleared the dust with the toe of his boot, slipped the narrowed point of the bar through the ring. Then it braced his shoulder against the oak beam overhead.
‘Heave,’ Merrow barked.
Eren threw his weight into the lever. The iron ring groaned, the mortar around the flat stone slab crumbling into a white, bitter-salt powder. With a wet, sucking gasp, the stone broke its fifty-year seal. A blast of thick, humid air rushed up from the dark square throat below—smelling of ancient river slime, decaying fern roots, and the scorching, rotten-egg breath of high-pressure water.
Pella knelt by the open hole, holding her lantern over the void. The light fell thirty feet into blackness. It showed the dripping brick curve of an ancient gallery. And beneath the sound of their own breathing, the cellar floor trembled. A rhythmic, shuddering kick that made the brass measuring tongs dance in Pella’s tool pocket. ‘The ladder,’ Pella said, her hand reaching back without turning around. ‘Lower the first section.’