A builder knew when a structure was going to fall before the first pebble slipped from the mortar.
It was not a matter of sight, nor was it a matter of hearing. It was a vibration that traveled through the marrow of a man’s shins—a deep, subsonic groan that began in the living bedrock three fathoms down, where the ancient faults of the mountain met the mass of forty thousand tons of limestone. Alden Bram had felt that groan forty years ago when the western sluice had collapsed during the great spring flood; he had felt it when the south tower of the ducal keep had buckled under an unseasonable frost; and he felt it now, vibrating through the frozen mud beneath his knees.
The boy in his arms weighed less than three bushels of dry oats.
Darek’s small frame was shuddering violently against Bram’s heavy wool chest, his breath coming in tiny, scorched gasps that whistled through the chemical smoke. The child’s skin smelled of blistered fat and hot sulfur, the canvas of his coat turning to liquid tar where the emerald flames were eating into the weave. Bram held him with both arms, wrapping his thick leather apron around the boy’s ribs, burying the child’s head into the hollow of his shoulder where the thick wool of his collar could smother the spitting naphtha sparks.
