The first stride Jon Hale took away from Sir Cael Ardent’s still body felt as though he had driven his boot into chest-deep river-silt freezing solid around his shins.
Behind him, the high, metallic shriek of the poisoned Returner Seal and the deep, subterranean thunder of the Hearth Nail merged into a single, ear-splitting chord that no longer travelled through the air, because the air itself inside the River Lantern Inn was crystallizing into amber glass.
Ten paces separated the corner supper table from the raised oak notary desk beside the hearth-post. Under ordinary lamplight on a rainy evening, Jon could have crossed those thirty feet of scrubbed oak floorboards in four long strides—less time than it took to draw a pint of bitter from the tap or carry a platter of roast mutton from the kitchen hatch to the hearth bench.
Now, with Reset Eleven uncoiling upward through the cellar vault like a white-hot waterspout, the outer edges of the taproom were already ceasing to exist.
Along the north and west casements facing High Street, the heavy oak storm-shutters that Tomas Miller and the river-barge polemen had bolted shut three minutes ago did not splinter or blow outward; instead, the dark seasoned oak, the wrought-iron crossbars, and the men standing beside them bleached to the colour of dry chalk, then thinned into luminous, swirling white mist as the eleventh evening was scraped off the parchment of the world.
