The heavy cedar crossbeam dropped into its iron brackets with a solid, echoing thud.
Barnaby Holt wedged a notched pine timber beneath the latch, testing the timber with a hard shove of his shoulder. The barracks door did not budge an inch.
Across the room, Sera Thorne pulled the heavy burlap curtains shut over the front window. She set her storm-pike against the stone sill, her grey eyes darting toward the chimney flue where the night wind whistled down from the jagged canyon rim.
“The perimeter is quiet,” Sera reported in a low whisper. “The guards down in the slag pits have retreated to their bunkhouses. But there is a scout crouched above the rear ridge, forty paces from the eaves.”
“Let him freeze his ears off,” Kaelen said.
Barnaby carried two heavy iron buckets of steaming water from the kitchen hearth, dumping them into a deep cedar wash-tub resting in the center of the inner storage room. A fragrant, pungent aroma of boiled wild mint and crushed spirit-ginger rolled off the surface, misting the dry stone walls.
“Two thousand stones, boy,” Barnaby muttered under his breath, shaking his seasoned hickory ladle at the cedar lockboxes on the table. “Do you have any idea what you’re doing? In the old Holt clan, a core disciple received three spirit stones a month and had to kowtow thirty times to the ancestral tablet just to say thank you.”
