Climbing the forty baking brick steps of the lower flue behind the two Ash Host guards who carried Marshal Ors’s plank, Jon Hale and Iven emerged into the vaulted stone cellar of the River Lantern Inn just as the ceiling joists overhead cracked and settled onto the shored south post.
Through the roaring white fog filling the basement, Jon heard Alden Bram’s triumphant bellow echo down the stairwell—The south beam holds the house, Jon Hale!—and felt the four cornerstones of the inn lock tight under the shifted roof load.
Down here in the subterranean vault, however, the stone floor was heaving like the deck of a river barge in a spring ice-jam.
With the cold-water reservoir boiled completely dry and the mechanical governor sheared in the chamber below, the entire trapped thermal reserve of the Crown Furnace was slamming upward against the granite ceiling of the lower dome. Along the north wall of the cellar, thirty-two barrels of autumn ale rocked violently in their oak cradles as the flagstones shifted; to the east, the mortar joints around the empty stone niche of Ben Rill’s cooperage hissed with escaping jets of yellow sulfur gas.
And in the center of the cellar floor, protruding three feet out of its cracked granite socket, the iron-bronze shaft of the Hearth Nail was glowing a dull, angry blood-red from base to tip, vibrating so fast that its fluted edges blurred in the steam.
