Inside the West Quay Stone Granary, the air smelled of old mouse-droppings, damp river granite, and the sour, fermented tang of sprouted barley that had rotted in the lower bins during the summer floods.
Jon pulled the heavy oak side-postern shut behind Dunstan Harl’s hand-barrow, leaving only the high, narrow clerestory louvres open thirty feet up under the slate eaves. Even in the middle of the afternoon, the vast central floor of the warehouse lay in deep grey twilight, broken by two rows of massive, three-foot-square granite piers that supported the upper timber drying galleries.
In the third life, when Jon had run down the cul-de-sac with a leather fire-bucket ten minutes after the explosion, those granite piers had been sheared off at the knees, dropping the entire slate roof and forty tons of burning oak gallery beams inward onto the packed floor below.
Today, the flagstones between the piers were cold, empty, and silent save for the drip of rainwater from the loading hood outside.
“We have fifty minutes before Lady Signe lets Warden Brecht loose from the north gatehouse table,” Jon said, stripping off his wet drover’s coat and laying it over an empty grain-bushel measure. “Where do we start, Master Bram?”
