Sister Merrow had managed the charity kitchen at St. Jude’s Landing through two cholera quarantines, three river blockades, and thirty-four years of rising spring tides. But she had never once failed to slide forty loaves of sourdough into the brick oven before the bells of the High Sanctum struck seven. In the damp wards of Lowbank, where a waterman’s daily wage was measured in copper pennies and wet boots, fresh bread was not merely breakfast. It was the baseline calendar of human survival. If the ovens went cold, the wharf laborers knew without looking at a proclamation that the social contract had collapsed.
At half-past four in the morning, carrying a tin lantern in her left hand and a flat beechwood scoop in her right, Merrow unlocked the iron padlock on the heavy oak door of the sub-level flour store. The storehouse was a vaulted stone chamber cut directly into the river embankment beneath the back kitchen, its four-foot walls lined with seasoned spruce bins containing twelve two-hundred-pound sacks of coarse river wheat. The grain had been purchased from the Lower Delta mills before Sorell’s court guards had padlocked the ferry slipways, purchased with the last silver coins in the parish poor box.
She stepped across the raised wooden doorstep. She pushed the heavy door inward on its greased iron hinges, and stopped dead. The surrounding air in the storehouse didn’t possess its usual cool, dusty fragrance of milled grain and dry cedar. It was warm—unnaturally warm. He smelled of heated limestone, damp earth. A sharp, oily musk that reminded her of crushed wet nettles. But far more alarming than the warmth was the sound. In the quiet gloom of the cellar, the stone walls were whispering with a dry, rhythmic clicking—a rapid, ceaseless tic-tic like forty clockwork escapements running wild in a tin basin.
Merrow raised her tin lantern, turning the wick high. The yellow beam cut through the darkness and lit up a living, surging carpet of jet-black hard shell. Across the flags of the storehouse floor, up the whitewashed stonework walls. Then it clustered three inches deep around the base of the spruce flour bins were thousands upon thousands of lantern beetles. Their polished black wing-cases gleamed like polished hard coal in the lantern light, their long, jointed antennae twitching all at once as they scrambled over one another in wild, uneven waves.
For a veteran of the field hospitals, panic was an unaffordable luxury. Merrow didn’t scream, nor did she drop her lantern. She took three slow, deliberate steps backward toward the threshold, her hobnailed boots crushing three of the hard shells with dry, sickening crunches. She lowered her gaze to the nearest sack of wheat. The rough burlap was crawling with hundreds of the insects, their sharp ankle claws snagging in the coarse twine as they climbed toward the rafters. If the beetles bored through the weave into the flour core, three thousand pounds of clean grain would be fouled with frass and moisture before noon.
She pulled the heavy oak door shut, rammed the iron bar home into its hasp. Then she drove a dry pine wedge beneath the door-bottom to block the threshold gap. She turned, marched up the stone steps into the washhouse back kitchen. Then she banged her heavy beechwood scoop three times against the side of the copper boiler. The metal boom rang through the rafters like a harbor alarm bell.
‘Pella!’ Merrow’s gravelly voice bellowed into the washhouse stairwell. ‘Eren! On your feet, both of you! Drop your blankets and fetch your boots! The larder is crawling!’
Two minutes later, Pella Rook stumbled down the cellar stairs, her work tunic half-buttoned, her hair caught in a messy braid. She grabbed Hal Rook’s brass check measuring tongs in her fist. Behind her came Eren Tal. His face was pale with sleep. His uninjured right hand carried a heavy iron pry-bar. Meanwhile, his bandaged left arm remained tucked into his linen sling. Young Tavi scurried behind them, rubbing his swollen eyes and dragging a bucket of hearth sand.
‘What is it, Sister?’ Pella asked, her voice raspy as she reached the bottom landing. ‘Did the baked-clay main burst again? Did the inner wall fail?’
‘The pipe didn’t burst, girl,’ Merrow said grimly. She pointed her scoop toward the barred oak door of the flour store. ‘Something worse. The cellar is crawling with lantern beetles. Thousands of them. The floor is three inches deep in black shells, and they’re climbing the wheat sacks. If they foul that grain, three hundred families in this ward will be chewing river mud by Friday.’
Eren’s jaw tightened. He set his pry-bar down on the dough bench, stepped to the larder door. Then he pulled the pine wedge from the bottom gap. He knelt on the damp stone, pressed his face to the quarter-inch crack beneath the timber. Then he drew a deep breath. ‘Hot air,’ he murmured, his brow furrowing. ‘That larder is usually forty-five degrees Fahrenheit in November. Right now, there’s an updraft coming under that door like someone lit a charcoal fire behind the wall.’ He stood up, looking at Pella. ‘Lantern beetles live in the deep shale vents beneath the saltings. They only come to the surface when the river floods the low caverns. Why would they climb into Sister Merrow’s flour bins?’
Pella unhooked her Courtesy Bridge slate from the wall bracket. That brought it close to the larder door. She tapped the quartz screen, initializing the local test display.
‘They aren’t eating the wheat, Eren,’ Pella said, her eyes tracking the reading on the quartz slate. ‘Look at the test slate. Lantern beetles are detritivores. Their jaws are built for scraping wet river moss and dead lichen off limestone under-road drains. They don’t have the biting mouthparts to chew raw wheat berries. They’re running from something down below. The heat from Sorell’s drain tube is driving them up through the foundation mortar.’
‘I don’t give a damn about their jaws, Pella,’ Merrow snapped, her hands resting heavily on her wide hips. ‘I care about twelve sacks of flour. If a beetle poops in a sack of milled wheat, the grain turns sour within twelve hours. We can’t bake it, we can’t sell it, and we can’t feed it to children. We have two hours before the dough needs to be set. How do we get four thousand bugs out of my bread bin without turning the grain into poison?’
Tavi stepped forward, his young face pale in the lantern light, pointing to the hearth. ‘We could smoke them out, Sister! We could take pitch torches and blow smoke under the door! My uncle used to smoke river hornets out of the apple trees behind the brewery!’
‘No, Tavi!’ Pella shouted, but her warning came too late. The boy was already running toward the hearth. His hands reached for an unlit pitch torch leaning against the chimney breast. The kitchen was on the edge of a disaster far more dangerous than beetles.
Eren lunged forward, his heavy right hand grabbing the collar of Tavi’s smock. Just then, the lad struck a flint over the dry pitch pine. ‘Drop that flint, boy!’ Eren roared, his deep voice shaking the soot from the chimney pipe. ‘You strike a flame in a flour room, and you’ll blow the roof clean into the river! Have you lost your wits?!’ Tavi froze, the iron striker slipping from his trembling fingers to land with a dull clink on the hearth.
Pella leaned against the dough bench, her breath coming in ragged gasps as the fight-or-flight rush washed through her veins. She looked from the scared apprentice to the barred larder door. There, the dry clicking of thousands of hard-shelled legs seemed to grow louder with every passing second. The High Sanctum had closed the gates, the court guards held the bridges. Now their own winter food supply was being invaded by creatures driven mad by the Grand Siphon’s underground heat. They needed an expert, and they needed one who understood biology without a wand.
‘The Courtesy Arch,’ Pella whispered. Her eyes turned toward the dark bronze uprights in the corner of the back kitchen. ‘Jo gave us the armor for the steam. Now we need to call someone who knows how an insect thinks. Tavi, fetch clean paper and a charcoal stick. We’re calling Harrowby.’
Sister Merrow returned to the hearth, pouring four tin mugs of boiling chicory infusion and setting them on the clean corner of the bread bench. ‘Drink this down while the water is hot,’ Merrow said. Her dark eyes looked from Pella to the wheelwright. ‘In thirty-four years in this kitchen, I have seen the river throw up everything from dead sheep to drowned smuggler boats. But I have never seen the shale insects leave their caves. The old watermen used to say that when the lantern beetles climb into the cellars, the river spirit is weeping in its sleep. Hal Rook used to tell me that the foundation arches were designed with spreading gaps specifically so the marsh life could breathe. If the College seals those gaps, they aren’t just locking out the water. They’re choking the stone.’
Pella knelt by the threshold of the flour store. It slid a dry pine shingle through the bottom clearance gap. She pulled it back. The wood was warm to the touch, and when she pressed her palm against the flat surface, she felt the clear fine shaking of underground boiling. ‘The heat is climbing, Eren,’ Pella murmured, holding her hand level. ‘Every minute we stand here, the mortar joint is getting softer. If we don’t clear those insects and cool that foundation before the afternoon tide turns, the ceiling arches in the larder will drop two inches. We aren’t just saving twelve sacks of flour. We’re holding up the back kitchen floor.’ Eren nodded, his jaw set grimly as he tightened the sling on his burned arm.