CRACK.
The sound that came from the adjacent kitchen was not the dull creak of a floorboard settling under a heavy flour sack. It was the sharp, rifle-shot report of a two-inch plank of kiln-dried valley oak splitting clean down the heart-grain from wall to wall as six hundred degrees of trapped subterranean furnace draft hit its underside.
Inside the treatment chamber, the shock vibrated through the floorboards hard enough to make the brass whale-oil lamps jump on their iron wall-hooks and send a cascade of dry lime plaster snowing down from the ceiling cornice across Lady Signe Lorr’s blue velvet shoulders.
Directly below the calm, slate-blue letters of KEEPER PETITION RECEIVED floating above Jon’s basin, the air split open a second time with a jagged, pulsing line of deep red systemic warning script:
WARNING: THERMAL BACKDRAFT EXCEEDS UNCOOLED FLUE CAPACITY SUBFLOOR STRUCTURAL IGNITION IMMINENT MIGRATION OF SAVE-POINT ANCHOR — 78%
Through the open doorway connecting the back passage to the kitchen, Jon saw Alden Bram wrench the heavy inner kitchen door all the way back against its stops.
In the center of the kitchen floor—right between the scrubbed oak table where they had sworn the Non-Execution Covenant that morning and the deep wooden flour bins along the pantry wall—a four-foot square of tongue-and-groove oak planking had bowed upward two inches like the back of a blistered boot. From the split seams between the boards, thin, pressurized ribbons of blue-grey woodsmoke were hissing straight up toward the drying racks where…
