The entrance hall of the Ferry Museum had the specific chill of a cellar that had never dried after a drowning.
Eren Tal held his pry-bar low against his thigh. It used the blunt iron horn to push aside a tangle of rotted hemp cordage that hung from an overhead timber rack. The floorboards under their boots were six-inch planks of white oak, bleached gray by old river mud and warped into shallow troughs where spring floods had deposited layers of fine river silt. With every step, the silt crunched with a sound like dry bone meal.
“Keep to the nail lines,” Eren said under his breath, pausing to let his eyes adjust to the murky animal fat glow of Korr’s lantern. “The floor beams run east to west toward the river quay. If you step on the center of an unsupported fourteen-year-old oak board in this damp, you’ll drop two feet into the crawl space and break a shin on an old bilge pump.”
He pulled a small block of dry cedar from his pocket and tapped the floor plank directly ahead of Pella’s boots. The wood answered with a solid, hollow thump. The clear deep ring of heart timber that had taken moisture on its upper face. But it held sound fibers through the grain. He moved three feet to the left and tapped again. There the sound was a dull, soggy plonk. It marked where water had pooled and softened the sapwood.
