Forty feet above the roaring brick shaft of the Re-Claim Chamber, propped against the central oak pillar of the River Lantern taproom with his shattered right leg bound in rough cedar splints, master mason Alden Bram did not need a brass sight-glass to know the exact second the four-minute cooling brake ran dry.
He felt it through the flat of his calloused right palm, which he kept pressed firmly against the dressed limestone hearth-jamb beside his hip.
For the past three minutes, while Jon Hale and Iven were down in the belly of the hill, the vibration coming up through the foundation arches had been the wet, rhythmic thrum of boiling water circulating through cast-iron jackets—a sound any millwright or brewery engineer knew how to measure by ear. Then, between one breath and the next, the wet thrum stopped. In its place came a high, dry, metallic singing that ran straight up the mortar joints of the chimney breast and made the iron fire-dogs on the hearth dance like peas on a drumhead.
The water jacket at the bottom of the hill was dry. Three concentric rings of superheated bronze and eighty thousand degrees of un-governed core pressure were expanding upward through the ancient relief channels of the Lantern Foundation, seeking the path of least resistance to the open sky.
