At ten minutes before midnight on the second night of the twelfth life, Jon and Elin walked down the stone cellar stairs of the River Lantern Inn carrying a single shuttered horn lantern between them.
Down in the deep vaulted chamber beneath the taproom, the air was cool, sweet, and remarkably still.
Thirty hours earlier, when they had descended these same steps on the first afternoon, the cellar had smelled of rising sulfur, hot mortar dust, and the frantic dread of a town bracing for an unseen knife in the dark. Even at dawn this morning, the granite flags had been warm to the touch while back-pressure steam bubbled up through the standpipe box and Sir Cael Ardent convulsed in hemp ropes against the central pillar.
Tonight, as Jon held the horn lantern up beside the central oak post, the stone floor beneath their boots was winter-cool—forty-two degrees by Sister Oda’s brass thermometer—and through the eastern foundation wall came the deep, continuous, musical rush of the mountain river coursing cleanly down the twenty-cellar bypass channel into the lower jacket of Old Hill.
Over by the square stone box of the aqueduct standpipe, the hinged oak lid stood open. Rising out of the dark, mirror-calm water inside the shaft, the graduated copper float-rod stood locked dead on the top white enamel line: twelve full cubits of cold reserve head in the upper shrine cistern, holding their seven-minute baseline thermal brake intact, backed by the five continuous auxiliary minutes of the winter…
