The roof of the inner command cell was not built of mortared stone. It was lined with three massive plates of rolled sheet lead, bolted to heavy oak floor beams with square-headed iron ship’s spikes.
Tomas Reed stepped into the low cell, the top of his oilskin hat brushing the grey metal overhead. The room was twelve feet square, containing only a bolted pine desk, an iron document chest with its lid wrenched off and empty. A single oak bench where Captain Danel had slept during the sixty days of the siege.
Tomas raised his lantern, holding the flame three inches from the ceiling.
The surface of the lead was covered from wall to wall in dense, tiny lettering.
“Look at the incisions,” Nessa Vale said, her voice filled with quiet awe as she joined him in the cell. She ran her fingertips across the dark grey surface. “It wasn’t scratched with a knife. The letters are grooved a tiny fraction of an inch deep into the soft lead, cut with the sharp, three-sided point of an iron needle-point arrow-head. Look at the burrs along the edge of each stroke. The metal was pushed aside by steady, heavy hand pressure.”
