The bottom of the magazine was a drowned tomb of black, rotten-egg clay sixty feet beneath the surface of the marsh.
To reach Tier Six, Tomas and Sile had to crawl through four feet of liquid silt, their bodies buoyed by the dense, cold muck. The water level had steadied thanks to the high-pressure drain tube Nessa had cleared. But everyone could feel the choking reek of ancient rot.
Crates Fifty-One through Sixty sat half-buried in the floor settled mud, their hardwood battens black and stone-hard from nineteen years of anaerobic flooding.
“These are the Class-Five siege breakers,” Sile whispered. He scraped the heavy silt from Crate Sixty with a bronze trowel. “Each sphere carries four times the charge of a trench grenade. The Grand Guild brought them here nineteen years ago to blow the marsh dikes if the northern warlords broke through.”
Tomas knelt in the mud, his scarred fingers feeling for the lifting rings. The rings were wrought from heavy bronze, green with green rust but structurally sound.
“Pass the double sling, Sile,” Tomas said.
Working shoulder to shoulder, they dug out the ten buried crates one by one, breaking the suction of the deep clay with horn spatulas. Every lift was a slow, painful test of sinew and nerve. A single sharp shock against the underwater granite floor could crack a high-pressure siege sphere, releasing enough explosive force to collapse the entire castle into a boiling sinkhole.
