The three-hundred-pound block of dressed granite did not whistle like the clay pitch-jars; it tore through the sleety air with a flat, grinding hum like a millstone dropped down a dry well-shaft. High above the bridge gatehouse, the boulder clipped the iron weather-vane of St. Jude’s belfry, sheared through four courses of heavy grey roof-slate over the north choir, and struck the main hammer-beam truss of the nave with a crack that shook mortar dust from every chimney in South Lane.
Jon Hale felt the impact through the soles of his boots before the sound finished rolling back off the river cliffs. Across the narrow street behind the bastion, the leaded glass of St. Jude’s east lancet windows blew outward in a glittering shower of diamond panes, followed an instant later by a billowing cloud of grey plaster-dust, shattered slate, and greasy black smoke as the brass sanctuary lamps hanging from the rood-screen plunged into the dry straw pallets below.
“The shrine roof!” Alden Bram shouted from the head of the scaffold stair, his mason’s eye reading the sag of the ridge-line through the smoke in a single heartbeat. “That stone took the center king-post clean out of the collar-beam! If the south wall-plate kicks outward, the whole choir vault will come down on the wounded!”
