The heat dropped ten degrees in the space of twenty steps.
The dry cut stone and clean granite of Tier One vanished, replaced by rough-hewn sandstone blocks weeping cold groundwater that ran down the mortar courses in slow, oily trickles. Every fourth step was slick with a thin film of green-gray cellar moss that smelled of river mud and rotting ditch grass. Tomas walked with his left shoulder pressed against the curving stone. His cart driver boots tested each riser before setting his full weight down.
Behind him, Hester Quill walked with one hand gripping the leather shoulder harness of Tomas’s coat, her horn-tipped cane sounding each flag with a hollow tap-tap. Behind Hester, Olla moved with light, careful steps. Her two archive boxes were balanced securely across her back, her breathing shallow and controlled.
At the thirty-sixth step, the spiral stairs opened into the underground gloom of Tier Three.
The scale of the place was staggering. It wasn’t a library. It was a drowned cave of stonework sixty paces long and thirty wide, divided into three parallel naves by squat, eight-sided pillars of dressed limestone that looked like the legs of stone elephants. The ceiling was low, barely nine feet high, supported by flat segmental arches whose arch stones were blackened by hundreds of years of soot and stained white with thick hardened stalactites of leaching lime.
