For a full minute after the back lane gate clicked shut behind Sir Cael Ardent’s retreating footsteps, the only sounds inside the ground floor of the River Lantern were the slow drip of well-water from the scorched heart-pine cross-joists and the faint, cooling tick-tink of the fused salt crust settling over the broken brickwork in the pit.
Jon Hale leaned his iron salt-shovel against the leg of the scrubbed oak kitchen table and walked slowly down the flagstone passage to the open doorway of the treatment chamber.
The rope cot stood empty, its boiled-linen bolster still bearing the damp hollow of the Returner’s head. On the oak side table beside the overturned soapstone basin, the Bound Leather Ledger (#7), the newly drafted fifty-share town compact, and the ten preceding shelf relics inside the wall-press were completely unharmed.
Jon righted the heavy pewter dish and looked down into its grey stone lining.
The Returner Seal was gone, carried back out into the night against Cael Ardent’s chest—yet as Jon rested his frost-reddened right palm against the wet rim of the bowl, he could feel through the ten white rings on his fingers and the four basalt cornerstones beneath his boots that the world had not snapped back to where it was before.
