The heavy iron door slammed shut with a hollow, concussive clang that shuddered through the cellar walls. Jon Hale dropped the four-inch ash crossbar into its wrought iron staples, cutting off the deafening roar of falling granite behind three feet of oak-lined iron plating.
For three heartbeats, the lower cellar vault of the River Lantern Inn smelled only of sour vinegar, damp silt, and old cured bacon. Then the stench of fresh arterial blood and scorched iron overpowered the quiet dark.
Across the wet flags, Sir Cael Ardent slumped against an empty thirty-gallon ale tun.
The knight did not sit down with dignity. His knees gave out beneath his mail coat, his back sliding down the curved oak staves until his tailbone struck the floor with a wet thud. His blued breastplate was crushed inward along the right ribs, the metal cracked where the falling lintel had pinched his torso against the canal threshold. His right shoulder hung three inches lower than his left, the joint visibly dislocated beneath the shredded linen of his tunic.
From an open, jagged puncture wound high on his left thigh, blood was pumping in rhythmic, crimson spurts that pooled between his boots. A three-foot length of twisted iron rebar, torn from an old flood gate bracket in the collapse, had stabbed through the boiled leather cuisse, piercing the femoral meat before tearing free in his scramble across the threshold.
