The inside of Waystation Five was a cave of cold, dusty neglect.
Tomas pushed open the heavy oak door of the main station house. Then, his lantern light revealed a vast common room that had been systematically stripped of its inside fittings. The iron pot-cranes had been unbolted from the fireplaces. The lead window weights had been cut from the sashes. The heavy pine tables had been chopped into firewood and their iron brackets pried away.
In the corner of the room stood an empty iron coal bin, its floor littered with dry pine shavings and the desiccated skeletons of mountain rats.
“They didn’t just abandon it,” Kael said. His voice shook with fury as he kicked an empty salt barrel across the flat stone slabs. “They looted it. The local upkeep builder came up here with wagons and stripped the public fixtures to sell as scrap iron in the valley markets.”
Tomas walked to the station keeper’s office behind the taproom.
The door was off its hinges, leaning against the wall. Inside stood a massive, built-in oak records desk, its drawers smashed open with an axe.
Lying on the floor among piles of torn paper and moldering account dockets was a heavy, thick parchment-bound volume stamped in gold leaf:
