At exactly two hundred paces depth beneath the courtyard flags of Stonewake Citadel, the square helix of the air-flow stair wound onto a broad, semi-circular landing cut from dark, glistening rock. The limestone that had formed the upper walls of the shaft had vanished forty paces earlier, replaced by a dense, fine-grained metamorphic baked flint-rock whose fracture faces shone like fractured flint in the orange glow of the lantern.
Directly opposite the stairhead, a heavy iron door hung half-open on forged bronze pintles. Above the top door beam, an ancient glyph had been chiseled deeply into the baked flint-rock doorstep. A stylized oil lamp burning above three stylized waves of stone—the universal royal mark for an underground dangerous fuel depot.
Kezra Venn paused on the landing, her left ear catching only the deep, silent weight of the mountain. Meanwhile, her right ear tracked the crisp scrape of Yseld’s boots on the dark stone. This was the two-hundred-pace landing. The final surveyed chamber noted on Ulvan Dret’s solid-inked field sheets. Ten paces below this platform, the solid lines on his calfskin map ended at the heavy registration tick. The unwalked, dotted unknown began.
Yseld approached the iron door with her climbing staff extended, hooking the curved metal ring behind the door’s heavy timber frame and easing it outward. The bronze hinges turned with a faint, smooth scrape that had been preserved by hundreds of years of dry stone oil fumes.
