The air sixty feet beneath the nave of the Grand Cathedral didn’t circulate. It stagnated, heavy with the cold, rotten-egg stench of ancient damp, decomposing bat guano, and the clear, sweetish reek of raw town sewage.
Tomas Reed dropped the final flight of slime-slicked limestone stairs into the lower undercroft. He held his uninjured right hand against the weeping saltpeter of the curved wall. His left arm remained firmly bound in its willow splint, strapped against his chest inside his wool coat, throbbing with a steady, deep ache that echoed the rhythm of his footsteps.
Beside him walked Sile Rook, carrying a brass Davy miner’s safety lamp in one hand and a six-foot iron-pointed sounding rod in the other. Behind the fine wire gauze of the lamp, the small yellow colza-oil flame burned steady, its blue halo showing only a harmless trace of marsh gas.
“Methane is light,” Sile rumbled, his voice echoing under the massive Romanesque cross-vaults. “No explosive pocket yet. But keep the open torches put out. One spark in a pocket of sewer gas and this cellar turns into a bomb.”
Nessa Vale stepped onto the flooded flat stone slabs, water splashing around her greased leather wading boots. She held an aimed sound probe and a bundle of dry pine dip-sticks tipped with white animal fat chalk. Her hearing horn had been lost in the fall from the western top stone ledge. In its place, she wore a silver aimed funnel lined with oiled velvet, lashed to…
