The darkness beyond the unfolded door had depth, weight, and the cold draft of an unheated crypt.
Where the ninth door had stood an hour ago—braced with its three heavy heart-oak beams and locked with five-inch iron pins—there was now only an open, receding expanse. The stone panels had unfolded like a giant carpenter’s rule, laying flat against the limestone flags of the Hall of Witness, their mortises clicking into place along the mortar lines.
Beyond that flat stone threshold stretched an impossibly long hall.
It was not a cavern, and it was not a tunnel. It was a formal banquet chamber that seemed to extend for half a mile into the roots of the mountain. Along its center ran two parallel rows of long, narrow dining tables covered in cloths of heavy black linen that absorbed the lantern light. The fabric did not hang limp; it rose and fell in slow, rhythmic undulations, as though something vast and slumbering was drawing air through the weave. Beneath the hanging hems of the cloths, where table legs should have met the flagstones, rows of pale, human-shaped lips were set into the timber pedestals, parting and closing in silent, synchronized gasps.
The air that drifted from the room smelled of dried rose leaves, cold mutton tallow, old audit ink, and the metallic tang of an iron spoon left too long in vinegar.
