The dry storage crypt beneath the western aqueducts was cold. It smelled of ancient lime dust, damp river silt. The bitter copper stench of melted solder.
Two hundred refugee bookbinders and trench laborers lay huddled in the dry brick alcoves fifty yards down the vaulted channel. It was wrapped in woolen rags and sodden blankets. Their exhausted murmurs drifted through the arched shadows, quieted by Master Corin’s disciplined spreading of dried hardtack and sulfur salve. For the moment, the thick stone bulk of the western water gate gates shielded them from the roaring storm of the Great Acoustic Nave.
In the center of the crypt, Ren Vale sat on an overturned wooden tool-chest, his shoulders hunched over a small potion-made fire bowl that glowed with charcoal embers. In his lap rested the two broken foundations of his existence.
On his left knee lay the Speculum of Forfeited Paths. The slanted fracture across its gold-silver metal edge had widened to nearly four tiny fractions of an inch. Through the jagged split in the silver glass, a faint, nonstop wisp of pale grey ash was seeping into the air. It drifted across the fabric of his trousers like smoke from a smoldering cigar. Deep within the Seventh Tier, beyond the swirling grey mists, a chilling shadow was shifting. A presence that felt colder than ice-slow ice.
