Moving like a grey moth through the dim morning air, Sister Oda stepped through the taproom archway into the kitchen. Her dark woolen habit smelled of dried lavender, bitter tallow, and the sulfurous vinegar she used to cleanse dressings at the bridge shrine. In both hands she carried her heavy leather satchel of parish registers, her brass-rimmed magnifying spectacles swinging from a braided horsehair cord around her neck.
Alden Bram looked up from the ash bench by the wall, setting down his empty porridge bowl. The two cast-iron screw-jacks he and Jon had seated below the charred gap held the sister-joist firm, their turnstiles locked against the limestone footing. The heavy oak baulks and pine trestles spanned the four-foot mouth of the flue like a siege platform, solid underfoot and level with the kitchen sill.
“Watch your skirts, Sister,” Bram cautioned, his voice a low rumble. “The floor is stabilized, but the pit is still drawing river air. If you drop a parish roll between the leaves, you will have to fish it out of the old flue.”
Sister Oda did not hesitate. She walked onto the bridging timbers with the sure-footed calm of an archivist accustomed to belfry catwalks. She stopped directly above the center of the gap, where the crack between the pine leaves looked down into the subterranean dark. Two feet below, the vitrified crust of salt and river sand that Bram had packed into the breached flume sleeve gave off a sluggish, metallic heat that smelled…
