The kitchen of fourteen Fish Street was filled with the warm, domestic smell of fresh cabbage soup, boiled potatoes, and curing lime plaster. On the stone floorboards near the cellar door, Mira Os’s two-year-old twin granddaughters, Molly and Sarah, were sitting on a clean woven wool rug. It rolled a painted wooden turnip between them with shrill giggles of delight.
Pella Rook and Eren Tal knelt beside the cellar hatch. There, the floorboards had been lifted to expose the stone foundation walls below. Where Sorell’s four-inch copper bypass pipe had once vented boiling sulfuric steam into the bedrock fault, there was now only a solid, unmoving mass of blue Lathmere river stone, bedded in high-pressure lime mortar and finished with a smooth coat of white plaster.
Eren laid the palm of his bare hand flat against the newly grouted stone. “Sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit, Pella. Surrounding cellar heat. The stone is fully cold to the touch. The sulfur water has pulled back down the deep fault. The river clay has sealed the fissure. You could store a firkin of fresh summer butter right against this wall and it wouldn’t melt in July.”
Mira led Pella down the clean wooden stairs into the cellar. In the corner where the coal bin stood, three tons of hard black hard coal were stacked behind fresh hemlock boards. Beside the coal bin, four large bushel sacks of winter potatoes and two barrels of salt cabbage sat on raised wooden walkway planks, dry and fully free…
