The baked-clay collar didn’t crack with the sharp, clean snap of dry crockery. It failed with a dull, grinding crunch, like a molar splitting under a stone in a loaf of bread.
For sixty years, the glazed fine china sleeve had sat wedged inside the limestone foundation arch of the Sluice Museum, starved of the animal fat-and-hemp packing that Hal Rook had specified on his cedar workshop model. All night long, while Master Davin Sorell’s upper ward bypasses remained dogged shut, the stone runoff from the high tanneries had backed up into the blind sandstone pocket behind the southern wall, cooking against the deep earth-heat vents until the trapped water turned into a white-hot, lime-soaked salt water. At 03:14 in the morning, a hairline breath of that heat had melted the crimson wax on Imran Bell’s fourth tin tab. At 12:22 and eighteen seconds in the afternoon, the fine china sleeve finally lost its war with the limestone pier.
A jagged three-sided shard of glazed heavy clay blew outward from the top of the bronze saddle. Behind it came a flat, screaming fan of white-gray vapor and boiling stone water, whistling out of the two-inch fracture at forty-two pounds of pressure.
