The Messenger Nook had been built eighty years earlier, during the reign of the first reformist council, as a secure underground listening post where town water wardens could monitor the flow of the Gray Rush through sound brass funnels embedded directly into the riverbed bedrock. It was a vaulted stone room, ten feet wide by twelve feet long, lined with rough-hewn granite blocks and paved with four-inch-thick flat stone slabs bedded in high-pressure lime mortar.
For forty years, Hal Rook had used this nook as his private thinking room. A wooden workbench, its top carved with hundreds of measuring tongs measurements and apprentice initials, sat against the western wall, beneath an unglazed iron air-wicket that opened into the high river gorge.
Today, the Messenger Nook was a death trap.
Warden Korr Var stood in the entrance archway, an iron-bound pine wooden props prop clutched in his leather-gloved hands. The torch in his iron wall-bracket cast a wild, smoking yellow glare over the flooded floorboards.
Pella stepped to the doorway, pulling Hal’s measuring tongs from her leather holster. She knelt at the edge of the dry floor. She extended the brass measuring arms across the opening of the fracture.
“Seventy-five tiny fractions of an inch at the center,” Pella announced, reading the engraved scale by torchlight. “And the edges of the granite are fresh. Sharp, unweathered crystal-clear facets. That means this break occurred within the last three hours. The stone didn’t slowly yield to moisture. It snapped under a single massive…
