The autumn twilight dropped over Fish Street like cold gray fleece. That brought with it a sharp northern chill that turned the standing pools of river overflow into skin of clear, brittle ice. But beneath the flat stone slabs of Master Karst’s cooperage, the earth remained unnaturally, dangerously warm, releasing thin wisps of rotten-egg vapor that smelled of scorched clay and old sewer mud.
Pella Rook knelt by the open digging trench in the cooperage cellar, her apprentice smock stiff with dried gray slurry. Hal Rook’s brass measuring tongs were clamped to an iron benchmark pin driven into the solid mountain stone five feet below the cellar floor. Beside her, Eren Tal and Korr Var were assembling the twin bronze cylinders of a heavy hand-lever grouting pump, their tools clinking against the damp limestone walls.
The air in the underground cellar was heavy with the sharp, bitter-salt tang of pipe lime, mingled with the earthy silt stench of disturbed riverbed mud. On a low bench near the timber cellar steps, Sister Merrow had set out an iron kettle of dark boiled tea and a loaf of dark sourdough crust, the familiar scents offering comfort against the cold underground damp.
‘We have an eighteen-inch shear cavity running forty feet along the bedrock contact,’ Pella reported, checking the measurement on her brass scale. ‘When Sorell blew the purge trunk, the boiling stone salt water washed out the ancient river silt cushion beneath the wall. If we leave that void open, the first…
