The check line at the roadhead took three hours. Captain Sile Rook inspected every single rivet.
The four hired marsh wagon drivers—stout, mud-spattered men from Peat-End who had spent their lives hauling turf wagons—stood in the gray morning drizzle with their boots off. Sile knelt in the gravel with an iron rasp and a wooden tray.
“Not one nail,” Sile said, his voice flat as an anvil. He scraped the sole of wagon driver Kester’s right work boot. An iron hobnail, worn flat by stone, caught the rasp. Sile gripped it with pincer tongs, wrenched it free. Then he dropped it into the tray with a sharp clink. “You strike that iron nail against a granite doorstep inside that tilted hall. The methane will burn the skin off your face before you can scream.”
Kester shifted his weight on his bare, dirt-caked foot, shivering in the cold damp. “We have dug peat twenty years, Captain. We know what swamp gas smells like.”
“You know what open peat smells like,” Sile countered, moving to the next boot. “In the open bog, gas vents into the sky. Inside the sunken castle wall, twenty years of burning acid vapor have nowhere to go. It sits in the hollows like spilled lamp oil. A spark from a steel buckle, a strike of iron on flint, a dropped pry-bar—and this whole ridge becomes a lime kiln.”
