The upright shaft beneath Cell Four was four feet square, lined with rough-hewn blocks of black dark rock that had not seen a torch in two hundred years.
Ren Vale dropped using iron rungs driven into the rock. Ancient climbing irons placed by the founding stone-masons of Duke Valen, their surfaces pitted with black rust that flaked away like dried tea leaves beneath his boots. His ankle chains had been unpinned by Ren-the-Cinder’s skeleton keys. Even so, the heavy iron collars remained locked around his shins. Their cold weight dragged at his calves with every step.
Above him, the three-ton granite slab had been eased back down into its recess by Unit Ren. That left only a two-inch gap propped open with an iron chisel to allow air and comms.
Ren reached the bottom of the shaft at forty paces of descent.
The descent down the dark rock shaft was a journey backward through two hundred years of town crime.
Every ten paces of descent, Ren observed the load-bearing strata of the courthouse foundation. The upper twenty feet were modern limestone cut stone, laid during the spreading of the High Court fifty years ago. Beneath that lay a layer of soot-blackened river brick from the Great Fire of two-hundred-and-ten. There, the old city archives had burned under mysterious circumstances.
