By eleven o’clock that night, the cellar vault of the River Lantern Inn felt like the hull of a timber ship riding above a hidden whirlpool.
Upstairs in the taproom, thirty armed townsmen and charter shareholders kept watch behind barred shutters while Elin and Widow Clara Moss tended the hearth fire and kept young Nell asleep in the inner buttery cot. Down here among the wine casks and the four inscribed foundation cornerstones, only four people stood around the narrow stone threshold of the ancient aqueduct service gallery: Jon Hale, Master Mason Alden Bram, Sir Cael Ardent, and Lady Signe Lorr.
Bram knelt on the lower granite step with a hooded tallow lantern in his left hand and his iron-shod ash cane in his right. At seventy years old, the arthritis in his knees made every damp stair a small negotiation with pain, yet his square, stone-dusted jaw was set with the stubborn concentration of a builder inspecting a cracking bridge pier.
“Feel the mortar joint along the west plinth, Jon,” Bram rumbled, holding his lantern close to the cyclopean granite blocks where the cellar’s rear foundation met the older subterranean stonework of Old Hill. “Dry as kiln-brick, and forty degrees warmer than the well-water cistern ten paces behind us. That isn’t steam coming through the cracks—that’s dry radiant draft from the core shaft.”
