Through the soles of his leather boots inside the inner circle of cold-iron filings, Jon Hale felt the rhythm of the house change before anyone else in the room spoke a word.
For the first twelve minutes after Sir Cael Ardent had dropped the Returner Seal into the soapstone-lined pewter basin, the pull beneath the floorboards had been vertical, plumb, and icy clean. The twelve white somatic marks on Jon’s fingers, wrist, and forearm had acted like twelve tuned organ pipes drawing the administrative weight of the save point straight down through the eighteen-inch ventilation shaft under the head of the cot and into the four basalt cornerstones of the Cellar Vault.
Now, as the blue stone-script floating above the frosted rim of the basin ticked past 73% ... 74%, a second, harsher vibration began hammering horizontally through the subfloor joists from the north wall—the party wall that separated the back treatment chamber from the River Lantern’s main kitchen hearth.
It did not feel like stone settling. It felt like a plugged steam-boiler in a wool-fulling mill when the safety valve rusts shut and the water in the jacket begins to hammer against the rivets.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
At the head of the cot, Elin looked up sharply from her earthenware willow-bark basin, where concentric ripples were shivering across the surface of the herbal water in time with the subterranean knocks.
