The four kegs of royal siege powder sat in a shallow depression beneath the overhanging lip of Stone Beta, bathed in the faint, yellow beam of Tomas Reed’s shielded mica lantern.
They were built from tight-grained white oak staves, fourteen inches tall and nine inches across the head. They were bound with heavy four-ply brass hoops. The brass was mottled with thick green crusts of green rust from twenty years of cave humidity. But the oak was sound, preserved by a thick dipping coat of black asphaltum varnish. Across the head of each keg, deeply branded into the wood, was the royal broad-arrow seal flanked by the lettering: R.A.B. · DEMOLITION CHARGE #4 · ROYAL ARSENAL BELLWETHER.
What made the blood run cold in Tomas’s veins was not the oak or the brass.
It was the amber sweat weeping from every seam.
Along the lower staves of the first keg, tiny globules of thick, thick, sticky liquid hung like drops of clear honey. Each droplet was three-eighths of an inch in width, quivering slightly with the distant shakes of the canvas air water chute. Around the rim of the copper detonator bung, the weeping liquid had partially evaporated over two decades. That left behind a delicate, crystal-clear crust of needle-sharp yellow flakes.
