The inner oak door of the municipal bathhouse swung back against its stone stop with a sodden thud, and a wall of scalding white vapor rolled over Jon’s boots.
He dropped into a low crouch beside the threshold, keeping his heavy ash tap-mallet raised across his chest while his eyes adjusted to the swirling mist of the tepidarium. Normally at dusk the municipal baths smelled of lavender soap, birch switches, and clean well water warmed over slow peat fires. Tonight the vaulted stone chamber reeked of scorched tallow, wet lime, and the unmistakable copper tang of freshly spilled arterial blood.
“Hold the lintel, Sister,” Jon breathed over his shoulder, feeling Sister Oda’s wool sleeve brush the back of his coat as she kept her shuttered horn lantern low against the floor tiles. “Do not step onto the wet slate until we see the corners.”
Across the thirty-foot chamber, the arched brick niches stood half-lost in dense fog. Someone had wrenched the cast-iron floor grate off the main hot-water sump in the center of the room and jammed an oak bench leg into the bronze boiler cock, forcing a continuous geyser of boiling mineral water to hiss across the flagstones. The roar of the escaping steam drowned out footsteps, breathing, and the drip of water from the vaulted ceiling.
