The mahogany dressing table in Room 2 was built of two-inch cured river timber, yet when Jon lowered the oiled-canvas bundle onto the corner of the black broadcloth, the frame gave a deep, creaking groan and the brass scale-pans jumped in their velvet box.
Jon’s fingers worked the tarred hemp cord with practiced steadiness. As he pulled the knots loose and folded back the four corners of the heavy sailcloth, a sharp, unmistakable smell filled the judicial chamber—river-silt, green copper verdigris, wet limestone mortar, and the ozone bite of high-alloy royal foundry bronze that had sheared under forty tons of hydraulic shock.
Sitting on the black broadcloth beside Lady Signe’s pigskin registers was Object #10: the massive cast-bronze sluice-gate locking pin and collar assembly from the lower dry aqueduct.
Even in the calm candlelight of a second-floor bedroom, the metal carried the violent geometry of the seventh life’s final hour. The cylindrical shaft was four inches thick, flanged at the top with a hexagonal wrench-head and encrusted around its lower collar with grey hydraulic lime mortar. Halfway down the main load-bearing shank, the four-inch bronze bar had been snapped cleanly in two along a jagged, forty-five-degree crystalline shear plane—its inner grain gleaming bright, raw, un-oxidized golden-pink like a newly minted sovereign broken in a giant’s vise.
