The remains lay at the bottom of the well, and the only way to see them was through the shielded port in the lowest chamber’s floor.
Mara had known the port was there since the first day. A round plate of thick glass set flush in the stone at the chamber’s center, with a brass ring round it and a cover that swung back on a hinge. She had stood on it a dozen times without looking down. There had always been something more urgent.
Now Eshel knelt beside it with a lamp on a long pole and swung the cover back, and lowered the lamp through a sleeve beside the glass, down into the dark.
Mara knelt on the other side and looked.
Far below, at the well’s floor, beneath the collar and the ring and the twelve sections hanging on their jacks: a shape. Round, massive, half sunk in a bed of dark metal. A housing. Like the Hearth heart’s housing, but larger, much larger, and older, its outer sheath pitted and dull. Lines ran from it in every direction into the well’s walls. Some were thick as a man’s body. Some were thin as a wrist. Most were dark.
