The dark at the bottom of the cellar stairs was hot, sulfurous, and thick with the smell of scorched marrow and boiling vinegar.
Noll Vey reached the lower landing with both stone boots skidding on loose mortar dust. Behind him, Tessa Dene dropped down the last four steps with a heavy pine balk in her arms, while Hobb followed with a blackened iron kettle of cold mutton broth sloshing against his greasy leather apron.
At the end of the narrow corridor, the ninth door was bulging like the belly of a dying horse.
The great oak lintel—a ten-foot beam of seasoned mountain timber four spans thick—had cracked straight through its center grain. A jagged yellow fissure ran from the keystone to the left doorpost, weeping drops of resin that hissed and smoked against the limestone floor. Through the split in the wood, a cold, unnatural draft whistled into the passage, carrying the sound of twenty iron chairs being dragged across broken glass.
Inside the room, the banquet tables were tearing themselves to splinters.
The creature was no longer merely screaming. It was pulling itself apart across the flagstones. Noll felt the violent, contradictory forces through the stone beneath his soles: on the left side of the chamber, three hundred yards of barbed iron plating were thrashing against the cellar walls, trying to swell into the great dragon-mouthed devourer that the vanguard had dreaded; on the right side, the flesh was dissolving into a thin, greasy cloud of carnival smoke that…
