The entrance to Bastion-Nine was not a ruin created by enemy siege engines. It was a crime hidden with sixty tons of limestone rubble and washed river gravel.
Tomas Reed stood before the collapsed portal. There, the four-foot-thick cut stone blocks of the main sally port lay jumbled in a jagged mound that choked the archway from ground to top door beam. The great keystone—a five-ton wedge of grey gritstone carved with the royal cipher—had dropped six feet into the opening, wedged tight between two fractured jambs by the deliberate explosion of the powder magazines beneath the vault.
Nessa Vale scrambled up the rubble slope, her boots kicking loose showers of river gravel that cascaded down into the ditch with a dry, rattling hiss. She knelt at the base of the fractured keystone, her brass rule measuring the fracture lines.
“Look at the direction of the blast spalls, Tomas,” Nessa said, her voice echoing in the hollow of the arch. “When a castle is bombarded from outside, the stones fracture inward toward the courtyard. Here, the outer faces of the granite blocks are fully smooth. The blast was set from inside the sally port. They placed thirty barrels of black powder directly beneath the arch springers, tamped the charge with sand bags, and blew the roof down on top of the entrance.”
