Sixty-eight seconds.
In the smoke-darkened doorway of the treatment chamber, the slate-blue letters of the municipal stone-script pulsed above the pewter basin like the steady beat of a cold iron pendulum, counting down the last fractional measure of Sir Cael Ardent’s Chancellery monopoly:
MIGRATION OF SAVE-POINT ANCHOR — 80% TIME TO COMPLETE ANCHOR LOCK: SIXTY-EIGHT SECONDS
Twenty feet away across the narrow flagstone passage, the kitchen of the River Lantern was turning into a chimney throat.
A second tongue of greasy yellow flame shot up beside the pantry flour bins where the subfloor pine lath had caught fire beneath the split oak planks. The heat rolling out of the kitchen doorway was no longer the dry warmth of a baking oven; it was the blistering, oxygen-starved roar of a smithy flue that had found forty winters of spilled mutton fat and barley dust in the subfloor joists.
Through the swirling grey-black smoke, Jon saw Elin on her knees beside the kitchen threshold, her wool kerchief dark with soot across her face as she braced both boots against the doorframe and heaved the heavy twenty-gallon oak wash-tub over the stone sill. The water sloshing over the rim hissed into instant white steam before it even reached the burning tongue-and-groove boards.
