Inside the check pavilion, Old Marta spread a large, yellowed sheet of drafting linen across the long oak table, weighting down its curling edges with brass apothecary weights. The ink on the drawing was faded sepia. But the stone-built elevations were drawn with the rigorous shape of a military engineer.
“This was drawn by Alia Sen’s master mason when the central sick room was erected forty years ago,” Marta explained, her bony finger tracing the underground foundations. “The clinic buildings on the surface were only seasoned pine and timber lath—the Barons may burn those to the earth in twenty minutes. But beneath the south medicine room lies the Great Crypt.”
Tomas, Nessa, and Hester Quill leaned over the chart. The underground chamber was forty feet long by twenty-four feet wide, sunk eight feet into the peat subsoil. The walls were built of two-foot-thick blocks of dressed gray granite, hauled down from the mountain quarries before the war. Then it roofed with a segmental barrel arch of hard-burned brick.
“What’s inside that crypt, Marta?” Tomas asked quietly.
“The life of this entire province, Tomas,” the old nurse replied. Her voice shook with fiercely suppressed emotion. “In the left aisle stand twenty iron-bound wicker hampers containing fourteen thousand cold and exact intake logs. Every child born in the delta during the fever. Every man who died. Every fever patient who recovered and returned to his heavy cart. Those books prove there has been no contagion in this valley for twenty-five years.”
