The grey ash didn’t drop down the stone chute like dry dirt. It poured like liquid lead. It filled the underground archive with the choking chill of an open glacier.
Ren Prime didn’t wait for the headsman to go down into the cramped darkness of the vault. He rolled the freshly inscribed spirit-thick parchment scroll with a swift, practiced flick of his wrists, slipping it into the inner pocket of his lambskin apron beside the tarnished gold-silver metal frame of the Speculum.
“Up,” Ren said, grabbing Mira’s mortal left hand. “We don’t fight him in a cellar. A court needs open air and a public witness.”
“How are we getting up?” Mira asked, looking up at the forty-foot upright drop of the chute. “Cinder didn’t leave a rope.”
“We don’t need a rope,” Ren said. He pulled the single solid brass counting frame bead from his pocket. The bead Vane Vale had left in his palm before dissolving into silver sand. “Vane spent nineteen months buying off the city drainage contractors during the tanners’ strike. He knew every counter-weight in the cathedral district.”
Ren jammed the silver tip of his mammoth ivory awl into the central drainage grating in the floor of the archive, levering the iron valve open. A massive underground counter-weight—an eighty-ton block of cast iron that controlled the floodgates of the Blackwater River—dropped thirty feet into the sump. He hauled a steel balance cable upward through the chute with the shrieking screech of grease-less pulleys.
