Forty minutes before he tapped on the River Lantern’s kitchen windowpane, Master Mason Alden Bram had gone back to the West Quay Stone Granary alone through the dark, rain-swept drainage ditch of the dry aqueduct.
At sixty-three years of age, Alden Bram had built or repaired three-quarters of the stone arches, cistern vaults, and quay walls in the parish of Harth. He did not know system windows, and until yesterday evening he had believed that a day lived once was gone forever into God’s keeping. What Alden Bram did know—with a certainty carved into his thumbs by forty-nine years of holding a cold chisel and a lead plumb-bob—was that stone did not lie.
Men lied. Royal proclamations lied. Knights in white surcoats with gold collars around their necks lied when they looked a town councilor in the eye and promised to hold the North Bridge to the last drop of blood.
Dressed river granite, laid on a six-inch bed of rammed gravel and set with slaked lime mortar, told the exact truth every time an iron bar struck it.
And at three o’clock that afternoon, while helping Jon Hale and Dunstan Harl set the six smoldering charcoal pans down the center aisle of the West Quay granary, Bram’s iron bar had struck the flagstone paving beside the second central hoist-pier and heard the hollow, drum-skin ring of an excavated void where solid gravel should have been.
