Thirty feet below the nave of Saint Jude’s Cathedral. There, the foundations of dressed granite met the living bedrock of the river bluff, lay the Sunken Chapel of the First Dynasty. For seventy years, the heavy wrought-iron door of the crypt had been sealed with five leaden padlocks, its threshold choked with black river silt and foul sewer slow leak that had leaked from the Ducal Palace channels above.
The air in the underground descent was thick with the choking stink of stale marsh gas, decomposing algae, and wet coal dust. By the tenth hour of the morning, Tomas Reed, Nessa Vale, and Sile Rook stood upon the lowest landing of the winding spiral stairs, lit up by four heavy glass miners’ lanterns that burned clean rape-seed oil.
Behind them on the stone stairs, twenty apprentice quarrymen and draymen were running three double-action bronze force-pumps. The rhythmic, clockwork thud of the oak pistons—clack-thump, clack-thump—echoed through the dripping vaults. That forced twenty gallons of gray, foul-smelling sludge every minute through flexible leather hoses up to the cathedral gutters above.
Apprentice Olla knelt beside the lowest pump, his bare arms smeared with foul gray grease as he worked wildly with an iron wrench to replace a split leather flapper-valve. “The intake foot-valve keeps choking on coal dust and horsehair, Master Tomas!” Olla called out, wiping muck from his forehead with the back of his hand. “If we don’t keep thirty pounds of pressure on the suction metal tube, the river backflow will…
