The iron grate behind the chapel garden opened with a screech of rusted hinges that sent two stray pigeons fluttering into the elderberry bushes.
Jon Hale led the descent down the spiral stone well, his boots seeking purchase on moss-slicked granite treads cut two centuries before the Crown drove the first survey stake into Harth’s valley. Below them, thirty feet down in the subterranean dark, the air smelled of stale lime, dry bat droppings, and the unmistakable, biting reek of raw sulfur powder.
The stone well emptied onto a narrow masonry catwalk running along the southern wall of the dry aqueduct.
Above their heads, the semi-circular barrel vault of river granite stretched into the gloom, its voussoirs weeping pale mineral salts where seepage from the church graveyard trickled through the joints. Below the catwalk, five feet down in the dry canal trough, lay the ancient silt bed—cracked, dry river clay strewn with rotting drift-timber, discarded barrel staves, and old iron nails.
A sharp, rhythmic clatter echoed from the northern intake arch thirty yards away.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
“They’re driving the fourth wedge,” Alden Bram whispered, leaning his shoulder against the conduit wall as he hauled himself down the final tread. The master mason carried a five-foot iron pry-bar in his left hand, his ash cane tucked under his arm. “They’re working the bottom hinge-pin. Listen to the pitch of the iron! That’s a three-pound sledge hitting hardened steel.”
