The moment the blue letters of KEEPER PETITION RECEIVED settled above the stone bowl, the cramped back parlor of the River Lantern Inn seemed to drop away from Jon Hale’s eyes like a curtain pulled back from a window.
His scarred hands were still planted flat on the frost-rimed granite lip of the vessel, his boots still braced on the oak floorboards beside Sir Cael Ardent’s bloodied pallet, yet through the direct physical coupling of the cellar anchor he could suddenly feel every dressed stone, timber joist, and water conduit within the four-cornerstone boundary of his house. He felt the thirty-two barrels of autumn ale resting in their new oak racks in the north cellar vault; he felt the iron brace and bronze fitting holding forty tons of shattered granite lintel wedged tight in the aqueduct intake; he felt the four minutes of cold river water hissing through the copper jacket around the three overheating rings of the Crown Furnace.
And rising up through the center of that vast subterranean map, straight out of the iron-bronze shaft of the Hearth Nail driven into the dark bedrock, came a silent, crushing weight of calculation.
The machine beneath the hill did not speak in the arrogant voice of Warden Brecht or the barked siege orders of Marshal Ors. It had been built five centuries ago by men who feared mortality above all other things, and when its military bearer fell away, its ancient governor immediately searched the mind of its new custodian…
