The iron rungs ended twenty feet above a circular gallery cut from the solid bedrock of the Old Hill. Jon dropped the final four feet, his boots landing with a dull, hollow impact on dry granite flagstones that rang like struck bells.
Behind him, Alden Bram climbed down with a grunt of relief, his pry-bar strapped to his back, followed by Sister Oda, who gathered her skirts and dropped lightly onto the stone, her horn lantern swinging from her wrist.
The chamber that opened before them was vast, circular, and silent save for the immense, rhythmic drone of the engine at its center.
It was a subterranean rotunda sixty paces across, its vaulted ceiling lost in the darkness above. The granite walls were curved with absolute mathematical precision, cut with vertical drainage flumes and stepped expansion joints that led downward toward the riverbed. The masonry showed the characteristic heavy dressing of the First Masons—massive ashlar blocks six feet across, laid without mortar, their joints ground with emery until they fit together like the plates of an armorer’s breastplate. But what drew Jon’s gaze—what pulled at the hair on his forearms and set the ten pale scars on his fingers throbbing with cold fire—was the structure in the middle of the floor.
