GAZETTEER · THE VALE

The Sunk Granary

aka Woolmark's hole

A caved-in Imperium grain-cistern off the Highbridge road, its stone throat swallowed by a sinkhole two winters back — worked now for the bronze auger-heads still bolted inside, and short one salvager who went in after the best of them and hasn't come out to spend the coin.

It was a farm well until the ground under it gave, and what it fell into was older: a stone cistern-vault the Imperium built to hold grain against siege, its walls still lined with the bronze auger-fittings that turned the grain to keep it from souring in the damp. Half the fittings have already gone to Highbridge smiths for good coin — that's Old Work, plain and known, and every farmer on the corridor knows exactly what a temple-bronze auger-head is worth and exactly how far down the last diggable ones sit. Sella Woolmark's brother Tam went down after the deepest ones a week and a half ago with a rope, a lamp, and a plan to be back for supper. The rope's still tied off at the mouth. Sella has not gone down after him — she knows better, and she knows the cistern's lower gallery flooded when the sinkhole opened, which means the water is doing something down there that a rope and a lamp won't fix. What she wants is not heroics. She wants someone who can go the distance a farmer's daughter with a bad knee can't, bring back whatever's left of Tam if it's bad news, and — if it isn't too much to ask on top of that — the auger-head he went down for, because the coin from it is the difference between keeping the croft and not. She is entirely honest that both things matter to her, in that order, and doesn't apologize for it.

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